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Terry Glavin: Emancipation Day once actually meant something in B.C.

Revisiting the sprawling drama of the province's early beginnings

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It’s an almost entirely forgotten history. It’s hidden away by all the prevailing postmodernist doctrines that oblige Canadians to be ashamed of themselves, and it’s not particularly convenient to certain of the more strident tendencies within the “anti-woke” schools of thought, either. But now that the Emancipation Day weekend falls on the British Columbia Day weekend, it’s worth taking the time to acknowledge a sprawling, dramatic chapter of Canadian history that only rarely gets a proper look-in.

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In that story, Canada came within a hair’s breadth of a war with the United States and the loss of what the Fathers of Confederation would go on to imagine as a peaceable dominion from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The Trump administration’s “51st state” provocations invoke memories of those times, and there’s a great deal of bloodshed, intrigue and betrayal in the story, which played out across the entire western half of the North American continent.

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There’s certainly no dearth of irony involved. British Columbia, which ended up uniquely belligerent to Indigenous rights among Canadian provinces, owes its very birth and survival to a visionary British colonial defence of Indigenous rights against American marauders and mob rule. The doctrine that treaty-making should precede European settlement and that Indigenous people were to be afforded all the rights of British subjects goes all the way back to the Royal Proclamation of 1763. There’s nothing “woke” about it. It remains a legal doctrine that was one of the chief grievances of the American Revolution of 1776.

All these years later, here we are: All the frantic panic about last year’s Supreme Court of B.C. decision declaring Aboriginal title in the Cowichan land claims lawsuit in Richmond, and all the incoherence arising from the B.C. government’s own-goal quagmire in its preoccupation with the serial redundancies of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of........

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