OTTAWA — NDP leadership candidate Avi Lewis says he’s paying no mind to perceived tensions between Aboriginal title and private property rights in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, despite having skin in the game as someone who maintains two residences in the area.
Lewis told National Post on Thursday that he didn’t think the
B.C. Supreme Court’s ruling last summer
recognizing the Cowichan Nation’s title claims over lands near Vancouver “is a threat to anyone’s private property.”
He also admitted that he hasn’t read the decision in its entirety.
“The decision itself is very long. I’ve read lots of analysis of it, and my impression is, I think the court went out of its way to say that fee simple (ownership) is not challenged by the decision,” said Lewis.
The August 2025 ruling recognized Aboriginal title over some 3.25 square kilometres of land in Richmond, B.C., including lands held by various levels of government and private owners. The court ruled contentiously that
fee simple and Aboriginal title
can coexist, arguably putting private landowners in a legal limbo where they still own their land but don’t have a sole claim to it.
Lewis said the decision merely reflected the inherent messiness of reconciliation.
“The easy part of reconciliation, the performative part, is in the past now. Now it’s going to be about working out title of the land. And this is largely done by governments and nation-to-nation negotiation,” said Lewis.
Lewis added that, if anyone is creating uncertainty about private property rights in B.C., it’s conservative rabble-rousers.
“My own personal feeling is that a lot of fear was whipped up, unnecessarily, for political advantage in the conservative movement in British Columbia,” said Lewis.
Lewis and his wife, best-selling author Naomi Klein spend most of the year in Vancouver, where they both teach at the Point Grey campus of the University of British Columbia. The couple and their son also maintain a family residence in Halfmoon Bay, a secluded nook in the nearby Sunshine Coast accessible
.
The average single, detached home
went for $901,000 in 2025, according to the Greater Vancouver Realtors Association.
One NDP politician who doesn’t share Lewis’s
attitude to the Cowichan decision is B.C. Premier David Eby, whose government is appealing the ruling alongside the federal government and City of Richmond.
Eby announced in December
$150 million in loan guarantees
for private landowners affected by the decision. He’s lashed out
for jeopardizing the province’s economy and promised changes to provincial legislation enshrining the United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
He was on the defensive again this week after news surfaced of the
with the Lower Mainland’s Musqueam First Nation, recognizing Aboriginal title over much of the Greater Vancouver area.
Eby says he wasn’t briefed on the deal but has
about what he knew and when.
Lewis said he wouldn’t “weigh in” on the joint appeal of the Cowichan decision.
A longtime NDP activist, Lewis has run unsuccessfully for a seat in Parliament in two separate ridings: West Vancouver in 2021 and Vancouver Centre in 2025.
Lewis said in an interview last fall that he chose each riding because he wanted to run for a federal seat “where I lived, on a point of principle, in communities where I was grounded and enmeshed.”
National Post
rmohamed@postmedia.com
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