A commentary on behalf of the Public Land Use Society. Warren Mirko is the society’s executive director, and Geoffrey S. Moyse has been engaged in the practice of Aboriginal law and public law for 31 years.

British Columbia is undergoing a profound, and largely quiet, shift in land ownership and jurisdiction that raises a central question: Who has final authority over this province’s public lands?

The provincial government is steadily redefining public land, which makes up more than 95 per cent of the province, as subject to Indigenous ownership and asserted legal authority.

For ordinary British Columbians, this shift could affect everything from access to public forests and waterways to floating homes and docks.

Yet there is no legal basis in Canadian law for the government’s supposition that Indigenous governance authority extends across the entire province.

By interpreting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) as granting blanket ownership to First Nations, the government is treating unproven claims as settled fact.

In doing so, it bypasses the courts and directly conflicts with Canadian law, which acknowledges only the ownership rights accorded by Aboriginal title, and only then where such title is declared by the courts over particular parcels of land.

In recent statements, Premier David Eby has described the Declaration Act era as “correcting the original colonial........

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