Geoff Russ: The South Africanization of B.C.

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Regarding democracy, the true spirit of “reconciliation” and “decolonization” has driven a wedge through Powell River, a small city on the B.C. coast. The local Tla’amin Nation has demanded that the city be renamed, and has rejected a referendum or opinion poll on that change, arguing that “the human rights of a minority should not be decided by a majority.”

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Even Powell River’s own Joint Working Group has said a poll is “not the appropriate tool.” Local power players have staked much on the renaming. After a wave of pushback, they are afraid of losing in the public square.

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The replacement of Powell River is already occurring, piece by piece and without public consultation. Powell River General Hospital was renamed in 2022, followed by the school board, both replacing “Powell River” with the name “qathet,” which means “working together.” Furthermore, the regional Vancouver Island University satellite campus was renamed to “tiwšɛmawtxʷ,” meaning “house of learning,” to eliminate references to Israel Powell, a controversial colonial official.

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Very ugly racial language has accompanied these changes. Former Tla’amin leader Maynard Harry went on the record declaring that, “the white people in Canada are subhuman because of what they’ve allowed to happen.” He repeated the word “subhuman” several times. There is no healing to be found in those words, and they make suspect the very notion that healing was ever the goal, rather than power.

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South Africa has already renamed more than 1,500 communities since 2000 on the basis of race, reconciliation, and retribution.

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Historic towns like Port Elizabeth, Uitenhage, and East London, all of which have great importance to Afrikaners and Anglo-South Africans, have had their names replaced. These changes were often made despite public surveys indicating fierce opposition, including from some Black South Africans, from the residents of these communities. These name changes have occurred alongside land and property seizures in the “public interest,” often with little or no compensation.

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Even if one were to concede that South Africa’s renaming policy is justified on the basis of correcting historic wrongs, that doesn’t justify emulating those policies in Canada.

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Even so, the B.C. NDP has fully embraced this worldview, such as Premier Eby calling B.C.’s origins an “original colonial mistake,” while his MLA Rohini Arora said in the legislature that India, Pakistan, and Canada “share the same colonizer.”

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In this worldview, B.C. is a sin that must be purged and remade into something new. The NDP has authorized literature that declares the term “British Columbian” to be exclusionary. It publishes official guides for immigrants where the only history section is about the mistreatment of First Nations. Newcomers are being taught to despise B.C. before even signing a lease.

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B.C. is obviously not materially, economically or historically comparable to South Africa, but its political narratives are converging. Black nationalists in South Africa chant “Kill the Boer” as a threat to white farmers, while Indigenous chiefs in B.C. speak of non-Indigenous people as “subhuman.”

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In both cases, enmity and resentment mobilize power players and move politics. Obviously, calling people “subhuman” is not a common practice or sentiment among Indigenous leaders in B.C., but it reveals that extreme sentiment is indeed present in decolonization discourse.

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B.C. does not need to import these crude politics. Its towns, laws, parks, and mountains belong to its citizens, not modern racial categories.

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Let the people of Okanagan Falls and Powell River choose to keep the names that they and their children have grown up with. Let B.C. not be renamed, replaced, and remade beyond recognition. Let us not walk on the road to becoming South Africa.

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National Post

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