You could have almost heard a pin drop in the shíshálh longhouse after Chief Calvin Craigan spoke to the assembled First Nation and local government leaders at the July 25 Community to Community Forum.
“Pretty quiet in here,” MC Candace Campo remarked, with some amusement, when she took the microphone to introduce the next speaker, Sliammon Nation Chief Clint Williams.
Craigan’s words did have a silencing effect on the gathering, and no wonder. The 70-year-old chief didn’t pull any punches. The shíshálh had given notice to the province and feds the day before, Craigan said. “We are telling them that we are taking control, we are taking our rightful place to govern the resources within our territory.”
Targeting Victoria specifically, Craigan said the province “will have no more say” in regard to foreshore development, water rights and forestry. “We will assert our right to overcome the provincial jurisdiction,” he said.
This was a very huge assertion, and I was eager to hear what the province had to say about it. I emailed the key quotes to the government and waited more than 24 hours. Instead of a high-level response from the premier’s office, what I got was an emailed statement from Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation Minister John Rustad.
Rustad did not refute or even acknowledge any of Craigan’s points. He merely said the province “had met with the Sechelt Indian Band to discuss a negotiating framework for the long-standing issue of dock management in Pender Harbour.”
Then he went on about completing a draft dock management plan that the two parties had worked on together, engaging the public about the plan at some unspecified time and then reviewing the results of that engagement with the Band.
It sounded a lot like business as usual, which in this case means bad business.
Pender Harbour is a big deal for the shíshálh, whose vast territory extends north from Roberts Creek to the south half of Texada Island and includes the areas draining into Sechelt, Salmon, Narrows and Princess Louisa inlets, Hotham Sound and Agamemnon Channel (all of which, of course, have shíshálh names).
Pender Harbour (kálpilín) is a special case because it was the site of the main winter village of the shíshálh people.
Speaking at the longhouse, SCRD chair Garry Nohr recounted how almost three years ago he and former chief Garry Feschuk went to meet Premier Christy Clark to seek a resolution on the Pender Harbour docks issue.
“The premier said to her staff, ‘I want this handled in 30 days.’ It’s almost three years now,” Nohr said, adding that Craigan had told him just that day about another 11th hour change made by the province.
“As an RD you begin to see the flaws in how the provincial government is handling this,” he said.
Feschuk, now a Band councillor, told the forum that the shíshálh had first come to the table with the province in 1993 to resolve the issue.
“Three studies have been done that were paid for by the province, with recommendations … that would work on the docks in Pender Harbour,” Feschuk said. “We tried to get them to implement their own recommendations. Today, not one has been implemented.”
The province’s chronic bad faith on the Pender Harbour issue is clearly a deliberate strategy, and Rustad’s response suggests it will continue until the courts impose a settlement.
With the Supreme Court of Canada’s Tsilhqot’in (Chilcotin) decision behind them, the shíshálh are confident that their territorial claim will be recognized and their Aboriginal title affirmed. The Band’s litigation, already well advanced, is now intensifying, Craigan said in a statement issued three days after the longhouse gathering.
The chief also gave everyone notice that this goes far beyond the Pender Harbour foreshore. But the province, it seems, doesn’t want to talk about that.
