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April 9, 2002
BCNU Council recommends members not return their ballots in aboriginal treaty referendum
While individual members of BCNU will decide for themselves whether to participate, Council believes the referendum should not be given legitimacy by returning ballots. Members can mail them to the First Nations Summit or another aboriginal organization to show support for the treaty process
While individual members of BCNU will decide for themselves how to respond to the provincial government’s referendum on aboriginal treaties, BCNU Council is recommending that members not participate in the vote.
Council suggests that BCNU members join members of other labour, community, religious and environmental organizations and refrain from sending their ballots back to the government. Instead, members may choose to sign their ballot envelope and send them to the First Nations Summit or another native organizations or band, as a show of support for the treaty process.
Council believes the negotiation of aboriginal treaties is essential to end years of unhealthy living conditions, hardship and injustice for aboriginal people in BC, and to end the uncertainty over land ownership that is holding back economic development. Council believes the Liberals’ treaty referendum is fundamentally flawed and will hold back the settlement of treaties.
First, it is wrong to use a referendum to determine questions of fundamental rights affecting a minority group. Second, the questions in the referendum are ambiguous and misleading. Some raise issues that are the responsibility of the federal government, which opposes the referendum. Others have already been decided by the courts. The government says it will consider a "yes" vote to be binding, while a "no" vote will be ignored. This is a classic case of "heads, I win, tails, you lose."
The result of the referendum will likely be confusion and division, postponing the conclusion of treaties and continuing economic and political uncertainty. Well-known pollster Angus Reid calls the referendum "one of the most amateurish, one-sided attempts to gauge the public will that I have seen in my professional career." BCNU Council believes that refusing to send back your ballot to the government is the best way to deny legitimacy to this mis-guided and unjust referendum.
BCNU Council took this position on Tuesday (April 9) one day after a similar position was made public by the BC Federation of Labour, College Institute Educators’ Association, BC Government and Service Employees’ Union, the IWA, Father Jim Roberts, the David Suzuki Foundation, BC Coalition of Women’s Centres, BC Human Rights Coalition, BC Muslim Federation, Office and Professional Employees’ Union Local 378, the Council of Senior Citizens’ Organizations, the Society Promoting Environmental Conservation, and others.
Members wishing to demonstrate their support for the treaty process should place their ballots in the certification envelope, sign the envelope and mail it to:
First Nations’ Summit Society,
207-1999 Marine Drive,
North Vancouver
V7P 3J3.
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