Towns and cities in B.C. need greater consultation with First Nations, particularly for disaster planning, and they need the funds to do it, says the Cariboo Regional District.
Municipal leaders from throughout the province have agreed, supporting the CRD’s resolution calling for more provincial support at the recent annual meeting of the Federation of B.C. Municipalties.
There are 15 First Nations in the Cariboo region, including several Secwépemc, Tsilhqot’in, and Dakelh communities, pointed out Cariboo Regional District board chair Margo Wagner.
The district would like to have First Nations representatives be an integral part moving forward in understanding how each other’s governments work, she said. They will have to learn to work together, something that is not going to happen if they only meet once or twice a year, she said.
Like all municipalities, the Cariboo Regional District relies on taxpayer money to provide services in the district, she added.
“First Nations do not always have the capability, the money to come into Williams Lake, Quesnel, etc. It is better if we try to go out to their territories some of the time, like a 50/50 split, but who is going to pay for this?” asked CRD board chairperson Margo Wagner. “Where are the funds coming from?
“It would come out of probably electoral area administration which we also tax for, which means the taxpayer gets hit again,” Wagner said in an interview with the 100 Mile Free Press shortly before the resolution passed at the convention in Vancouver last week.
The request will now go to the provincial government in Victoria and Wagner said a lot is at stake for local taxpayers throughout the province.
Without a positive response from the province, the regional governments will have to finance local implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples out of their own coffers.
The resolution was one of five brought forward by the CRD, all of them endorsed by municipal leaders at the annual meeting.
Those resolutions include the lobbying the provincial government to allow individual property owners to make exclusion applications to the Agricultural Land Commission, rather than through local governments. Only local governments can currently make such applications due to changes put in place in 2020.
The union will ask the province, as suggested by the Cariboo district, to require provincial approving officers to notify rural residents of subdivision applications in their areas and to end the use of the Canadian Black Book as the basis for setting provincial sales tax on used vehicles, instead of actual sale prices.
And it will ask the province to include local governments in the planning process for broadband and internet improvements in their areas.
UBCM delegates delivered three main messages last week, according to the organization’s new president, Coun. Trish Mandewo of Coquitlam, on decriminalization of illicit drugs without adequate treatment support, housing and wildfire prevention.
On climate change and emergency preparedness, municipal leaders want the province investing more in wildfire prevention, Mandewo said.
Looming behind specific requests are pending updates to provincial emergency legislation due to be tabled next month.
“Our members continued to express concern that (this) will add new responsibilities to local government without a plan in place to fund those responsibilities,” Mandewo said.
When it comes to climate change, municipalities need additional resources, she said, pointing to the provincial government’s decision to download authority over dikes without proper funding. While climate change was an issue when the province made that decision, nobody could have anticipated the size of the change, she said.
- With files from Wolfgang Depner
