NP View: This ‘reconciliation’ is a disaster for Canada 

October 28, 2025 - Hundreds attend the Cowichan Ruling Info Session at Sheraton Vancouver Airport Hotel in Richmond, BC, October 28, 2025. (Arlen Redekop / Postmedia staff photo)

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Billions of dollars in settlement money. Land acknowledgements prayed before any government event. Exclusive access to once-public parks. Soon, perhaps, the court-ordered handover of private property. That’s been the government recipe for reconciliation for the past 10 years, and it’s been nothing but a disaster.

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Canada must atone for its treatment of Indigenous citizens over the course of history. But that shouldn’t involve folding to the extreme demands of the Land-Back left, which has been the recipe for reconciliation thus far.

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Talk of restoring “stolen land” has been popular on CBC airwaves, amongst other progressive media, for years now. But it was only in 2025, with the B.C. Supreme Court’s Cowichan Tribes ruling, which held that fee simple land ownership does not displace Aboriginal title, the reality of returning “stolen land” kicked in.

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In practice, it looks like this: landowners being told by their mayor that the Indigenous claim to their land “may compromise the status and validity of (their) ownership”; businesses claiming they are being denied loans for projects in the title area; realtors reporting mortgage uncertainty.

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Their land isn’t being seized tomorrow, and defenders of the Cowichan Tribes decision will remind you that the Indigenous claimants didn’t ask for it. But the Indigenous claimants did ask for government-owned land, and the court ordered that it be handed over — so unless an appeal succeeds in beating back the court’s new understanding of how property law works, these landowners won’t have much of a defence.

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Land seizure is a real risk: in New Brunswick, where the entire province is subject to First Nations claims, a judge suggested that courts could order the Crown to seize private property on behalf of an Indigenous group and compensate the landowners in turn. Quebecers should be worried too, as the Algonquin have just filed a title claim to large swaths of the province.

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There’s just no end to it. B.C. has ceded provincial parks to its Indigenous people, who block members of the general public from entry on the basis of colonialism. B.C. has renamed its schools to words no one can read, as it’s done with some streets. It’s cemented Indigenous input into education, lawyer regulation and even mining claims. That wasn’t enough.

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It’s the same all across Canada. Universities have prioritized Indigenous candidates for both jobs and student slots. Manitoba is working on mandating land acknowledgement policies for schools. In Ontario, Grade 11 students in the biggest boards will no longer study classics in English class — this hasbeenreplacedwith a full year of Indigenous literature. But there is always more reconciliation to be done.