Study
| EST. READ TIME 1 MIN.Incomplete, Illiberal, and Expensive: A Review of 15 Years of Treaty Negotiations in British Columbia and Proposals for Reform
This study reviews the treaty process in British Columbia since 1993, its assumptions, costs, and outcomes as evidenced in signed treaties, final agreements, and agreements in principle. It analyzes the current federal and British Columbia government approaches to land claims and the initial hope: signed treaties, finality, fairness, and a desirable liberal approach to relationships between peoples.
There are positive aspects to the treaties that have been signed and in the pipeline; they include fee simple property ownership of reserve land and an end to Indian Act authority, but aboriginal and other Canadians risk seeing those positive elements undercut with clauses that will create a thicket of policy traps, bureaucratic interference, and economic disincentives in their attempts to move forward into a more prosperous twenty-first century for aboriginals.
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Mark Milke
Mark Milke was a senior fellow of the Fraser Institute between 2010 and 2015. Mr. Milke led the Institute’s workon Alberta-related issues as well as contributing to a broad host of national and regional studies. Mr. Milke is currently an independent analyst and consultant in Calgary.Mr. Milke has authored four books on Canadian politics and policy and dozens of studies on topics such as property rights, public sector pensions, corporate welfare, competition policy, aboriginal matters and taxes. Prior to joining the Fraser Institute, Mr. Milke was the research director for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and former B.C. and Alberta director with the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation. His work has been published widely in Canada since 1997 and in addition to the Fraser Institute, his papers have also been published in the United States by the American Enterprise Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation and in Europe by the Brussels-based Centre for European Studies.Mr. Milke’s opinion columns appear regularly in the Calgary Herald and Globe and Mail, as well as in the National Post, Edmonton Journal, Montreal Gazette, Vancouver Sun, Vancouver Province, and Victoria Times Colonist. Mr. Milke has a Master’s degree from the University of Alberta where his M.A. thesis analyzed human rights in East Asia; he also has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Calgary where his doctoral dissertation analyzed the rhetoric of Canadian-American relations. Mr. Milke is president of Civitas, and a past lecturer in Political Philosophy and International Relations at the University of Calgary.… Read more