EDITORIAL PAGE — Who is conning whom?

In October of this year, Paul Birckel, chief of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations, fired off a letter to British Columbia Premier Michael Harcourt asking the government to withdraw its support for the establishment of a World Heritage Site nomination for the Tatshenshini-Alsek wilderness area in the northwestern corner of the province.

Parks Canada had already forwarded the nomination to the United Nations on the understanding that the British Columbia government had consulted with Birckel and the native group in its preparation.

This was not the case, however, and Birckel was raising a fuss that the proposal would jeopardize his Yukon band’s rights and titles to its traditional territory in British Columbia — territory which overlapped with the area being considered for the site nomination.

The provincial government, preoccupied as always with political correctness, was in a bind. Harcourt had no qualms about expropriating mineral claims held by non-native interests for his park initiative (including claims hosting the rich Windy Craggy copper-cobalt deposit) and was not unaware of the prospect of scoring points with environmentalists for this unrivalled piece of foolishness. Property rights could go out the window, but it was quite another thing for his New Democratic government to be perceived as running roughshod over native land claims.

Delicate footwork was clearly in order. Harcourt, Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Cashore and other government officials met Birckel behind closed doors in Vancouver on Dec. 5 and somehow persuaded him to withdraw his opposition to the proposal — and in the nick of time, too, as the World Heritage Convention of the UN was scheduled to meet in Phuket, Thailand, on Dec. 9-16. On the agenda was Canada’s nomination of the Tatshenshini wilderness area as a “heritage site.”

So what brought about Birckel’s change of heart?

“I was reassured that both the park and UN designations would not prejudice our land claims in any way,” Birckel tells The Northern Miner. “And I was also told by the government officials that Windy Craggy was `all promotion,’ and `a flash in the pan.’ They told me there was `nothing there.'” This assessment will no doubt come as a brutal shock to the holders of the expropriated mineral claims, who are still cooling their heels at the back of the line for a meeting with the premier, or any other government official, to start the long-delayed compensation process.

The provincial government’s actions are not going over well with 24 Reform Party Members of Parliament who believe all British Columbians deserve a say in the matter. They recently sent an urgent letter to Prime Minister Chretien asking that he personally intervene and withdraw Canada’s nomination. The MPs also petitioned the World Heritage Convention to decline the nomination in an 11th-hour communique sent to Thailand.

The MPs rightly argue that there has been no public debate or discussion on the nomination and that there are deposits within the Tatshenshini with values conservatively estimated to be in excess of $10 billion. “The provincial government has managed to turn a substantial provincial asset into a net liability to the taxpayers of British Columbia,” says Michael Scott, Reform Party MP for Skeena. “Canada doesn’t even get an opportunity to vote on this designation. Representatives from 21 other countries will decide the matter for us — this is absurd!”

We couldn’t agree more.