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National Post

Josh Dehaas: There's no denying land acknowledgements are political

Article content Last month, with the assistance of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, a group of University of British Columbia professors and a former student filed a lawsuit asking the B.C. Supreme Court to protect academic freedom by ordering the university administration to stop breaching its statutory duty to remain non-political: No more requiring fealty to DEI ideology from job applicants. No more statements about the Israel-Gaza war. No more land acknowledgements by the administration in academic settings where academic freedom is impinged. Article content Article content There's been little pushback to our claims that DEI purity tests or Israel-Gaza statements contravene B.C.'s University Act requirement that the public university's administration remain non-political. The criticism of our claim that land acknowledgements are political has been substantial. One critic is UBC assistant professor Scott Franks, who argued in an op-ed in the Globe and Mail that, rather than being political in nature, 'land acknowledgments are statements of legal fact.' Franks offers an example: it's a 'legal fact,' he says, that the land that UBC Vancouver sits on is 'unceded and that the Musqueam Nation retains title to those lands.' Article content Article content It's difficult to understand how the assertion that UBC is on 'unceded' Musqueam territory, to which they have title, is anything other than political. There is no court decision that says the Musqueam possess title to those lands. That includes Aboriginal title, which is the communal right to use land that courts have found in small parts of B.C., where First Nations have lived continuously and with the ability to exclude others since the Crown assertion of sovereignty. Article content Article content Franks writes that former Supreme Court chief justice Brian Dickson rejected in the 1984 decision Guerin v The Queen 'the idea that Indigenous peoples' rights were discretionary and political when he found that the Crown owed legal obligations to the Musqueam Nation when it assumed control over the nation's lands.' But Guerin was not about the UBC lands; it was about former reserve lands nearby. Franks may argue that because the Musqueam once used the land that UBC sits on and never 'ceded' it via treaty, that they retain some form of title (the Tsleil-Waututh make similar claims to the same lands). Right or wrong, that's political. To understand why, consider the B.C. Human Rights Tribunals' jurisprudence on what counts as 'political,' developed in the context of political discrimination claims. Article content Article content In the 1994 decision Jamieson v. Victoria Native Friendship Centre, the tribunal found that the Friendship Centre had discriminated against a prospective employee, Jamieson, for his political beliefs asserted in connection with his membership in the Mohawk Warrior Society. The tribunal found that the beliefs in question were political because they concerned 'the way First Nations communities are organized and governed and how these communities relate to each other and to other levels of government.' Claims that UBC is on 'unceded' land, and that the Musqueam have title, are similarly about how the First Nation community relates to the B.C. government. Whether those claims are right or wrong (we take no position), they are political.