Harman Bhangu, the Conservative MLA for Langley–Abbotsford and the official opposition’s transportation critic, told Drea Humphrey of Rebel News the thing forestry and mining offices have been saying in his Victoria meetings: the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act has become a barrier, and he wants it off the books. Last session, David Eby’s NDP talked about amending or suspending parts of DRIPA and related Interpretation Act language. Then First Nations leadership took issue, and the premier walked it back. The government’s own line was that it would not introduce legislation to suspend or amend DRIPA, or the UNDRIP-related Interpretation Act provisions, in the spring sitting. Eby later offered the sentence that should be carved on the decade: it is absolutely possible, as a leader, to move off confidently in the wrong direction.
Bhangu’s answer is procedural, not theatrical. Elections BC, under Chief Electoral Officer Shipra Verma, approved in principle his initiative petition on August 27. The draft bill is two sentences. Repeal the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, S.B.C. 2019, c. 44. Come into force on Royal Assent. The petition issues October 26. Signature sheets are due January 25, 2027. The bar is 10% of registered voters in each of the 93 electoral districts — miss one riding and the petition dies. Bhangu put the harvest near 360,000 names. The exact quota will be calculated on the register the day the petition is issued. Since 1995, fourteen initiatives have been approved in principle. Even success is non-binding. The legislature still has to vote. October 5, when the House returns, is the other clock. He wants the government to table a repeal, debate it, and stop hiding behind a consultation that never produces a text.
That is the politics. The investment case is older. You buy low to sell high. Canada, and British Columbia in particular, have been offering the low for years. The discount is not geology. The Golden Triangle did not move. The discount is title uncertainty stacked on a statute that tells every court and every proponent to read provincial law through a United Nations declaration the 2019 House passed unanimously and has not been willing to revisit when the cases landed.
What DRIPA Is — and What Repeal Would Not Magically End
DRIPA is not a slogan. It is the provincial act that requires British Columbia to align its laws with UNDRIP. UNDRIP’s free, prior and informed consent language is the clause capital reads as a veto risk even when lawyers insist the Supreme Court of Canada has not written a veto. Duty to consult and accommodate already exists at common law. Haida did not need Victoria to import a General Assembly text. What the 2019 statute added was a statutory instruction to rewrite the province’s own book, plus Interpretation Act hooks that litigants have already used. Coverage of the Gitxaala line of cases and the Cowichan title decision — Aboriginal title described as prior and senior to some other interests, including in a live private-land argument — is why fee-simple holders in the Lower Mainland and project teams in the north are suddenly reading the same act.
Repeal would not repeal Aboriginal rights. It would not repeal treaties. It would not make consultation optional. It would take the statutory overlay off a system that already had a constitutional floor, and it would tell a pension fund in Toronto that the next decade’s rule is the one in the Minerals Title Act and the Environmental Assessment Act, not a rolling alignment exercise whose next amendment depends on who is angry this month. Fraser Institute analysts Julio Mejia and Tegan Hill put the investment point without a microphone: unpredictable land rules deter the capital that pays for schools. A pending agreement that could thicken Indigenous decision-making across a large share of a mineral belt is the live example, not a hypothetical.
First Nations leadership will fight repeal. They said they would fight even Eby’s narrower suspension. That opposition is a fact. So is the other fact Bhangu hears in the hallway: forestry is depleted as a job machine, mine files sit in process, and one in three British Columbians, in his telling, is looking at a plane. Whether that outbound figure is a hard statistic or a constituency mood, the direction is the one this publication has been marking federally — young attachment thin, productive work scarce, a government that talks critical minerals and then cannot say who signs the permit.
Buy Low, Because the Policy Discount Is the Entry
Resource investors do not need a lecture on mean reversion. You buy the ounce when the market hates the address. You sell when the address is allowed to produce. British Columbia’s porphyry belts, coastal fibre, gas in the northeast, and the infrastructure already in the ground are not worthless. They are underwritten at a political discount. That is what “Canada has to be at some sort of low” means in a portfolio, not in a funeral oration. The low is the bid-ask after DRIPA, after assessment clocks, after a premier who announced a direction, reversed it, and called the reversal leadership.
A re-rating does not require a boom. It requires a sentence a credit committee can put in a memo: the statutory duty to rewrite the code to match a UN text is gone; consultation remains; title litigation remains; the mine can still be modeled. Capital that fled to Arizona brownfield — Hudbay’s Sonoran close, Faraday’s San Manuel paper — was voting against that memo. Bring the memo back and some of the bid comes home. Leave it and the next generation of British Columbians will keep buying plane tickets while the summit in Toronto talks about undeveloped metals.
Bhangu’s sport line — he will not back down from 93 ridings — is the campaign. The investor line is colder. Ninety days is a short window for a province-wide canvass. Opponents will organize. The NDP can run out the clock until January and still refuse the bill. None of that changes the microeconomics. Uncertainty is a tax. Repeal is a tax cut on the only export sector that still pays for the import bill.
What Opening the Industry Would Actually Take
Repeal is necessary and not sufficient. Permits still have to move. Power still has to be priced. A forestry tenure still has to mean fibre. A mine still needs a tailings decision that is a decision. Ottawa’s critical-minerals posters do not bind Victoria, and Victoria’s DRIPA posters do not bind a court. The stack is the problem. Pull the statute that tells every other statute to reshape itself and you at least stop adding floors.
Indigenous participation in equity, jobs and impact benefits is not the enemy of that stack. Predictable private capital is how those agreements get funded. A process that can halt a file after ten years of study funds lawyers. The common good Beauregard was arguing for in another hour — a nation that is more than an economic zone — needs a payroll in Prince George and Smithers, not another alignment report.
If Eby tables a repeal on October 5, say so. He has earned skepticism. If Bhangu misses a riding in January, the law remains and the discount remains. The rock does not care which. The bid does.
Conclusion
DRIPA wrote a United Nations declaration into British Columbia’s statute book and then discovered that courts and proponents would read it. Eby moved to amend, then to suspend, then to next fall. Bhangu filed two sentences and got a petition window. Forestry, gas and mining asked for certainty. That is the cheap entry. You buy low when the rulebook is the risk. You sell high when someone in Victoria is willing to say the rulebook is the province’s again.
Canada is at that low in the only sense an investor needs. Not finished. Marked down. Repeal is how you stop marking it down further. The signatures are the civic half. The mill is the other half. Do both or keep watching the airport.
Important information
This article is commentary for Canadian Mining Report readers based on a public Rebel News interview with Harman Bhangu and on Elections BC’s published approval of initiative petition IP-2026-001. It is not legal advice on Aboriginal title, DRIPA, or property rights, and not a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Petition thresholds and political outcomes are uncertain. Duty to consult exists independently of DRIPA. Consult legal and investment advisers. The author and publisher accept no liability for actions taken on the basis of this article.