The more you look at the treaty process in B.C., the bigger a fan you become of the “lock them in a room and don’t let them out until they get a deal” approach to negotiations.
Canada, B.C. and dozens of First Nations have been sitting at negotiating tables for 23 years now, shuffling papers back and forth and eating up hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money, with scant returns on that investment. Any bright young lawyers or advisers who embraced this field as a career will be well into middle age now, possibly thinking of retirement. Good for them. But when all they have to show for those years of meetings is a handful of treaties and agreements in principle, it’s bad for us.
The big stall was blamed for the about-face that led to former B.C. Liberal cabinet minister George Abbott being unappointed as chief treaty commissioner last year, just as he was poised to take over the sinecure. “What’s the point?” seemed to be Premier Christy Clark’s attitude. The commission supposedly rides herd over the dozens of tables and cheers all three parties on from the sidelines, trying to keep the process going forward. But over and over again it has reported abject failure.
Freezing Abbott’s appointment led to a year of angst in the field, as people wondered what happens next.
There was an announcement Tuesday that suggests what’s in store. It looks to be some very timid suggestions to make some mild changes in the entrenched process that might or might not create some progress. Maybe it will take only 50 more years to get the job done, rather than the 600 needed if things proceeded at the current rate.
The ideas come from the “Multilateral Engagement Process to Improve and Expedite Treaty Negotiations in B.C.”
The jargon is eye-glazing, but it reflects an understanding by all parties that the status quo is not acceptable. That’s portrayed as an achievement all by itself, which gives you an indication of how minutely they measure the idea of progress.
The trouble is that the same parties who have contributed in varying degrees to the lack of progress are the ones recommending ways to break up the logjams. There’s no indication anyone thought of bringing in a hard-eyed outsider for an independent look at this slow-motion train wreck.
Instead, the parties named a senior officials group and a technical working group, both of which spent months examining what they did — or didn’t do — over the past decades. The same people who have kept the merry-go-round running for years were charged with examining why it hardly went anywhere.
Here are some of their ideas:
• Increasing the flexibility in the process. Instead of proceeding lockstep through the five stages of negotiation for years on end, they talk of new ways to streamline negotiations, and better tools and approaches to reach a wider range of side deals in advance of concluding an actual treaty. Parties would scope their proposals earlier by laying more of their cards on the table earlier in terms of their interests, their capacities and their mandates.
Instead of the laborious process to get to agreement-in-principle, they would consider a condensed AIP that would have the core elements of land, money, fish and areas of jurisdiction.
Negotiators now spend a lot of time on standard-process chapters. The new idea is to use canned material from previous negotiations. There’s even the idea of a deadline. Once the parties get to AIP, they have X years to close the deal. Also pitched is a stepping-stone approach, where full treaties are reached incrementally, piece by piece.
• Negotiation funding. First Nations fund their negotiations through loans from governments and the debt is now huge. So are the doubts about repayment.
The idea is to fund them in a way that discourages unnecessary costs or delays. There would be “clarification” of what’s eligible for funding, curbs on duplication of effort and new guidelines on cost management.
They are good ideas, but years overdue. As for implementing them, the tripartite statement reminds everyone: “It will take time to make progress … ”
Tell us something we don’t know.
