Your Property Title Is on the Table

Since 2019, British Columbia has been rebuilding the legal foundations of land ownership. Most of the province found out from the news.

The framework nobody voted on

DRIPA passed that fall. Section 3 commits the province to bring every BC law into line with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Section 7 goes further: cabinet can sign agreements that give an Indigenous governing body joint decision-making over statutory decisions, or make its consent a precondition.^[1]

The first section 7 agreement, signed with the Tahltan in 2022, made consent the basis for the Eskay Creek mine's environmental assessment.^[2] Cabinet negotiated it and published it once it was done. The legislature never debated it and voters were never asked.

In early 2024 the government tried to extend the same model across Crown land tenures (the docks, grazing leases and rights-of-way that touch most of the province) through quiet amendments to the Land Act.^[3] The backlash was immediate. Eby shelved the plan within weeks.^[3]

Angus Reid's polling caught the method in the act. Thirteen per cent of British Columbians had heard anything about the changes. Seventy-two per cent called the process rushed, and 74 per cent wanted a referendum before anything so fundamental moved.^[4] The government's instinct had been to do it quietly anyway.

Haida Gwaii came next. In 2024 the legislature recognized Haida Aboriginal title across the entire archipelago, the first recognition of its kind in Canada, with assurances that fee simple property would carry on unaffected.^[5]

Then a court applied the law

The assurances lasted a year.

In August 2025, after the longest trial in Canadian history, the BC Supreme Court declared Cowichan Aboriginal title over part of Lulu Island in Richmond and found the fee simple titles Canada and the city held there 'defective and invalid.'^[6] The Land Title Act's indefeasibility provisions, the bedrock under every BC mortgage, gave the registered owners no protection at all.^[7]

That ruling sits on three decades of Supreme Court of Canada doctrine. Aboriginal title cannot be sold except to the Crown and cannot be mortgaged,^[8] and since 2014 it has been a constitutionally protected property interest beyond the reach of any provincial statute.^[9]

The market repriced your deed

A $98-million bid for Richmond's Versante Hotel collapsed after the ruling. The buyer cited it in court filings, and the hotel later sold for a fraction of what was owed on it.^[10] A Richmond councillor reported a 40-year-old manufacturer refused financing for a $100-million project.^[11] By March 2026, appraisers across BC were writing land-claims exclusion clauses into their valuations.^[12]

Eby's answer was $150 million in loan guarantees for owners in the title area.^[13] A property tax expert representing Richmond homeowners put the need closer to $1 billion.^[14]

A guarantee is an admission. The risk his government spent years waving away is now real enough that taxpayers underwrite it.

Years of this to come

The province is appealing, and so is everyone else: all seven parties, including Cowichan Tribes, who want the title area expanded. No hearing date exists. Stay applications run into 2027, against a court-ordered negotiation deadline of February 2027.^[15]

Meanwhile Ottawa signed agreements in February 2026 recognizing unextinguished Musqueam rights and title across much of Metro Vancouver, with the familiar assurances about private property.^[16] Richmond is the measure of what those assurances are worth once the law is applied.

None of this needs bad faith to be damning. Watch the sequence. The legal commitment comes first, the public hears about it afterwards, and the cost is socialized when it surfaces. Certainty of title holds up every mortgage in this province, and this government treats it as a detail.