Chris Gardner is president and CEO of the Independent Contractors and Businesses Association.
Over the past 15 years, Brixton Metals has invested more than $70 million in its Thorn critical minerals project in northwest B.C. They followed the rules, worked with local communities, paid fees to the Tahltan and B.C. governments, and worked with local First Nations.
“When a government quietly experiments with new forms of “co-title” and “consent-based decision-making” over big chunks of B.C…. it’s playing Jenga with the legal foundation of our economy.”
—Chris Gardner
Now, in a new land-use planning process rolled out by the provincial government, they find themselves shut out of meaningful consultation, relegated to a single workshop dominated by conservation groups – treated as a problem, not a partner or investor.
This is the real-world face of the Tahltan–B.C. Planning Project, a land-use process in northwest B.C. that could hand effective control over an area larger than Portugal to a small Indigenous group. The area in question covers roughly 11 per cent of the province’s land mass, yet the NDP government says the process will be wrapped up within the year, essentially in secret.
Proponents like Brixton are only now being invited at the eleventh hour, years after the planning process began, when “material decisions may already have been negotiated” between B.C. and the Tahltan.
“Rather than meaningfully engaged,” industry partners feel as if they are “being managed” and “being informed about decision that appeared to have already been made,” stated the Brixton letter, which was also cc’d to several BC Conservative Opposition critics.
Think about the message that sends to investors and the wider community.
You can spend a decade and tens of millions of dollars only to discover that the rules are being rewritten and a land-use deal struck without your knowledge or participation. Your access can simply be cut off or your tenure ended. This is expropriation by stealth, dressed up as reconciliation and embedded in an ill-conceived, rushed and unbalanced land-use planning exercise.
Read the full article for free, as reprinted by the Northern Beat: Secret Eby government land-use deals are ‘expropriation by stealth,’ says business leader – Northern Beat