Victoria: Ground Zero
How a small Vancouver Island activist ecosystem implemented BC’s reconciliation law, took the seat that delivered it, and now consults, votes, governs, and litigates around it.
May 9th, 2026
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Most British Columbians do not realize how much of their provincial politics runs through Victoria. Not Victoria as a capital city, but Victoria as a small, dense, ideologically coherent activist ecosystem operating within roughly ten square kilometres. The neighbourhoods of Fernwood, Oak Bay, James Bay, and Gordon Head produce the policy. Victoria City Hall, the University of Victoria, the Parkland Institute alumni network, a handful of nonprofit and consulting offices clustered around Johnson Street and Broad Street, and the law firm Arvay Finlay LLP on Douglas Street, all sit within walking distance of one another. The same eco-progressive endorsers back the same candidates election after election. The same households, faculties, law firms, labour councils, and party offices recur, generation after generation.
This is hidden in plain sight. None of what follows is secret. All of it is on the public record. The point is to show how tightly the pieces fit together, and how a single small geographic and professional network is now positioned around BC’s most significant Indigenous-rights legislation from every angle of public life: cabinet, council, consulting, and the courtroom.
British Columbia’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA) was the first law of its kind in Canada when it passed in November 2019, drafted by then-Attorney General David Eby. It commits the province to align its laws with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It is the legal foundation under which several of the largest Aboriginal title cases in Canadian history are now being argued. The August 2025 Cowichan Tribes decision, the longest trial in Canadian history, granted Aboriginal title over land in Richmond, BC, including approximately 125 privately held parcels. The 2023 Gitxaala ruling reset BC’s mineral tenure framework. The December 2025 BC Court of Appeal ruling in the same case held that DRIPA incorporates UNDRIP into BC positive law with immediate effect. The 2021 Yahey ruling halted new industrial permits across Treaty 8 territory in northeast BC.
The implementer of that framework, the inheritor of the seat that delivered it, the spouse who co-founded the consulting firm whose research surfaces in court, the academic-turned-policy-analyst-turned-councillor sitting next to that spouse on Victoria City Council, and the former councillor now suing the province under the law itself, all of them live, work, and litigate within roughly ten kilometres of each other on Vancouver Island. The same law firm appears on both sides of the loop.
No wrongdoing is alleged here. The point is structural. Whether it should remain unscrutinized is a question for British Columbians.
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The Implementer
Murray Rankin, K.C. was the primary implementer of DRIPA and co-author of the 89-action Declaration Act Action Plan, in his capacity as Minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation from November 2020 to October 2024 under Premiers John Horgan and David Eby. DRIPA itself passed in November 2019, before his ministerial tenure. He was also briefly Attorney General and Minister of Housing during that period. Before provincial politics, he was the federal NDP Member of Parliament for Victoria from 2012 to 2019 and served as Justice Critic. He briefly headed the National Security and Intelligence Review Agency from 2019 to 2020. Before federal politics, he spent thirteen years on the UVic Faculty of Law from 1977 to 1990 and was co-chair of the Environmental Law Centre. He was called to the BC Bar in 1976. In 1990, he co-founded Arvay Finlay LLP with the late Joseph Arvay, building one of British Columbia’s most consequential public-law firms.
Rankin’s organisational record is a forty-year tour of BC’s progressive legal-advocacy infrastructure. Founding member and former president of the BC Public Interest Advocacy Centre. Former president of West Coast Environmental Law, an organisation that has received Tides Canada funding. Past chairman of The Land Conservancy of BC. Co-chair of the Environmental Law Centre at UVic. Founding board member of the Western Canada Wilderness Committee.
Rankin’s own description of his cabinet legacy was direct. In an exit interview with Black Press Media on his retirement announcement in June 2024, he said:
“the highlight of my life in politics has been to oversee the government’s implementation of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People Act.”
— Murray Rankin, June 2024
He retired ahead of the October 2024 provincial election. His seat as MLA for Oak Bay-Gordon Head opened up. He returned to Arvay Finlay LLP as Counsel in 2024 and joined the Canadian Centre for Environmental Arbitration and Mediation in May 2025. The implementer of BC’s reconciliation framework is now in private practice using that framework, at the Victoria firm he founded thirty-five years ago.
The Succession
The seat went to Diana Gibson, a longtime BC NDP affiliate. Her relationship to Rankin is not a passing one. In an interview with the Times Colonist candidate questionnaire (October 2024), Gibson described her decades-long political relationship with him in her own words:
“I have been a NDP volunteer for over two decades. My kids have grown up on Murray Rankin’s campaigns.”
— Diana Gibson, Times Colonist, October 2024
On June 3, 2024, the day Rankin announced his retirement, Gibson announced her own candidacy. She told Victoria Buzz:
“We are a better province, a better country, a better world thanks to Murray’s work. Volunteering on his campaigns, I saw how hard he worked to earn the trust of our community.”
— Diana Gibson, Victoria Buzz, June 2024
Per Elections BC published returns, her 2024 campaign reported $0 in individual contributions and $95,123.22 in transfers from the BC NDP. A campaign fully funded by the provincial party. She won Oak Bay-Gordon Head, was sworn into the BC cabinet as Minister of Jobs, Economic Development and Innovation on November 18, 2024, and was moved by Premier Eby to Minister of Citizens’ Services on July 17, 2025.
Before politics, Gibson had a parallel career in policy research, Indigenous-impact consulting, and progressive nonprofit leadership. From roughly 2004 to 2012 she was Research Director at the Parkland Institute, housed within the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta, where she remains a listed Research Fellow. From 2009 to 2016 she was co-founder and CEO of The Firelight Group Research Cooperative, an Indigenous-impact consultancy. She subsequently held senior roles at Canadians for Tax Fairness and was Executive Director of the Community Social Planning Council of Greater Victoria, growing the organisation from two to sixteen staff and launching the Greater Victoria Rent Bank, ID Bank, Housing Policy and Climate Equity programs.
She is named as author or co-author on at least four substantive Firelight regulatory studies between 2014 and 2015, filed on behalf of Blueberry River, Gitxaala, and Kitselas First Nations on the Coastal GasLink and Prince Rupert Gas Transmission pipeline projects. She is also identified by name as a Firelight Director and Project Team member in the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation’s Supplemental Submission to the Shell Jackpine Mine Expansion Joint Review Panel, on file in the federal CEAA registry. Several of those First Nations subsequently became foundational litigants in the Aboriginal title cases now reshaping BC regulatory law.
Gibson as registered BC government lobbyist, 2021
Per the BC Office of the Registrar of Lobbyists, while serving as Executive Director of the Community Social Planning Council of Greater Victoria, Diana Gibson was a registered lobbyist of the BC government. Her registration as an in-house lobbyist began November 29, 2021. She lobbied the same provincial government she is now a sworn member of as Minister of Citizens’ Services. Her transition from registered lobbyist of BC government to sworn member of BC cabinet, in the same policy areas, took place over a period of approximately three years.
The Husband - Victoria City Councillor
Diana Gibson is married to Dave Thompson, confirmed in Business in Vancouver coverage of the 2024 BC NDP campaign, October 17, 2024. The piece notes that Gibson’s bid was helped by her husband, city councillor Dave Thompson. Thompson was elected to Victoria City Council in October 2022 and serves concurrently as Capital Regional District Director, Capital Regional Housing Corporation Director, and Capital Regional Hospital District Director. He and Gibson co-founded The Firelight Group together. He is a co-founder of PolicyLink Research and Consulting Inc., owned 50 percent by Thompson and 50 percent by Diana Gibson.
On Thompson’s BC Statement of Disclosure under the Financial Disclosure Act, signed January 14, 2026, PolicyLink Research and Consulting Inc. is named as his asset under Section 3(a), as a source of income in his capacity as Principal and Director under Section 3(b-d), and as a corporation in which he owns more than 30 percent of voting shares under Section 5. The disclosed type of business is Research, and management and governance consulting. The disclosure is properly made on the face of the form.
Thompson’s own Firelight authorship is documented. On December 2, 2015, the Cumulative Environmental Management Association in northeast Alberta approved the deliverable he produced as co-Principal Investigator with Craig Candler under CEMA Contract 2014-0005, a two-year contract valued at $404,200. The deliverable was titled Indigenous Traditional Knowledge Framework. The framework is a UNDRIP-aligned policy document for the inclusion of Indigenous Traditional Knowledge in environmental decision-making, regulatory hearings, and cumulative effects assessment. The document predates DRIPA in BC by four years but is built on the same UNDRIP foundation that DRIPA implements at the BC provincial level. Thompson’s substantive professional expertise sits squarely in the policy area BC implemented through DRIPA in November 2019.
The Structural Overlap
The Firelight Group is now a much larger organisation than when Gibson and Thompson founded it. Operating under the legal name Firelight Research Inc., the firm employs more than a hundred staff across six offices. Its principal registered office is at Xwmelch’tstn (Squamish Capilano Reserve #5, West Vancouver), with an additional office in Victoria. The firm reports approximately $4 million in annual revenue and is majority Indigenous-owned by three First Nations individuals from Gaa-gwekwekojiwang (Ebb and Flow First Nation, Manitoba), Tr’ondek Hwech’in (Yukon), and Ketegaunseebee (Garden River First Nation, Ontario). Their names are not publicly disclosed in available sources. Current named leadership includes Steve DeRoy as Co-Founder, CEO, and Director, and Rachel Olson as President. Craig Candler, Thompson’s co-investigator on the 2015 CEMA contract, departed Firelight around 2019 and now operates Reciprocity Research Inc. in Victoria.
In the BC Public Accounts for fiscal year 2024-2025, Schedule of Payments to Suppliers, Firelight Research Inc. received $118,447 from the provincial government. The scope of that work is not disclosed in the public accounts.
Diana Gibson’s current cabinet portfolio is Citizens’ Services, the ministry that oversees the Indigenous Procurement Initiative, the BC government framework that directs government-wide procurement toward Indigenous-owned businesses. Firelight Research Inc. is majority Indigenous-owned. It maintains a Victoria office. Diana Gibson co-founded the firm now eligible for, and benefiting from, the procurement framework her current ministry oversees. No public recusal declaration in respect of Firelight has been located in available sources. The Office of the Conflict of Interest Commissioner of British Columbia holds any filed declarations under the Members’ Conflict of Interest Act; those records are not fully indexed in open public sources, and the question of whether Gibson’s declaration adequately captures the spousal interest in PolicyLink and any continuing interest in Firelight is a matter for the Commissioner’s office to address in the public record.
Gibson left Firelight in 2016. Thompson’s January 2026 disclosure declares PolicyLink, not Firelight, as his current corporate asset. Whether either currently profits from Firelight’s BC government work is a question for the public record, not an allegation made here. What is on the record is that the cabinet minister who succeeded BC’s DRIPA implementer, who herself was a registered BC government lobbyist three years before joining cabinet, is married to a co-founder of a firm whose research is submitted in proceedings under the framework her cabinet defends, and now sits in the ministry that oversees the procurement framework that firm benefits from.
The Slate
Victoria has, quietly and consistently, become the most activist city hall in British Columbia. The 2022 municipal election produced a Council with a clear ideological coherence, anchored by a slate that won together and has voted together on the major files of its term. Both the Victoria Climate Action Team and the Victoria & District Labour Council endorsed the same slate of candidates: Ben Isitt, Jeremy Caradonna, Dave Thompson, Krista Loughton, Susan Kim, Matt Dell, plus mayoral candidate Marianne Alto. Caradonna, Thompson, Loughton, Kim, Dell, and Alto won. Isitt lost. Three other councillors, Marg Gardiner, Stephen Hammond, and Chris Coleman, sit outside that bloc.
Mayor Marianne Alto has documented historical roles as Vice-President of the BC NDP and national Treasurer of the federal NDP. Her 2022 mayoral campaign was endorsed by former BC NDP Finance Minister and Deputy Premier Carole James. BC municipal elections are officially non-partisan; Alto’s documented NDP party-executive history is a matter of public record. Before politics she has been Principal of Azimuth Research and Consulting since 1996. She chaired the CRD Special Task Force on First Nations Relations from 2011 to 2018 and currently chairs the CRD Arts Commission.
The Centre for Civic Governance
Two members of the 2022 Victoria slate, Dave Thompson and Susan Kim, sit on the Advisory Council of the Centre for Civic Governance, the Columbia Institute project that runs training for progressive municipal elected officials in BC. The board chair of the Columbia Institute is Sussanne Skidmore, who simultaneously serves as national Treasurer of the federal NDP, Vice-President of the BC NDP, and President of the BC Federation of Labour, elected to that role in 2022. Two sitting Victoria councillors from the 2022 slate share an advisory seat at an organisation chaired by a senior NDP party executive and the current BC labour federation president.
The Labour Council bridge
The president of the Victoria & District Labour Council from 2020 to 2023, the body that endorsed the 2022 Victoria slate, was Darlene Rotchford. In the 2024 BC general election, Rotchford ran as the BC NDP candidate for Esquimalt-Colwood and won. She now serves as Parliamentary Secretary for Labour and as Parliamentary Secretary for Armed Forces Development and Veterans Affairs. The president of the body that endorsed the 2022 Victoria slate is now sitting on the BC NDP government side of the Legislature alongside Diana Gibson. The personnel pipeline between the municipal endorsement infrastructure and BC NDP electoral politics is direct and documented.
Dogwood and the Wilburforce ecosystem
Dogwood Initiative, a Victoria-based environmental advocacy organisation, was a registered third-party sponsor in the 2022 Victoria election. Dogwood has been documented in BC media coverage as a recipient of US foundation funding pathways including the Wilburforce Foundation (Seattle), Tides US, and other US-Canada environmental philanthropy networks. The Wilburforce Foundation also directly funded a 2016 Firelight Group scoping study titled Priorities and Needs for First Nations Establishing Indigenous Protected Areas in British Columbia, currently published on Firelight’s own website. The same Seattle-based foundation that funded the firm Gibson and Thompson co-founded was, in the same period, part of the funder ecosystem behind the Victoria third-party sponsor backing the slate they ran on.
Jeremy Caradonna
Jeremy Caradonna is the slate’s most prominent voice. He is the Council member with the most direct prior experience inside BC government and the most public profile on the questions DRIPA implements at the municipal level. Born in Seattle, Washington, per his own published campaign biography, he holds a PhD in History from Johns Hopkins University and was an Associate Professor of History at the University of Alberta in Edmonton from 2008 to 2016. The Parkland Institute, where Diana Gibson served as Research Director from approximately 2004 to 2012, is housed within the same Faculty of Arts as the U of A History Department. Their tenure at the same faculty overlapped for approximately four years. No documented professional collaboration, co-publication, or formal relationship between them at U of A has been located in available sources.
American born, Caradonna immigrated to Canada and moved to Victoria in 2012. Before standing for Council, he spent three years inside the BC government. He was Senior Policy Analyst at the BC Office of Mass Timber Implementation from 2020 to 2022, and at the BC Climate Action Secretariat from 2019 to 2020. He resigned from BC government in 2022 to run for Victoria City Council. He won. He is also an Adjunct Professor in UVic’s School of Environmental Studies and co-hosts the Best Coast Political Podcast with fellow councillor Matt Dell. He has announced that he will seek re-election in the October 17, 2026 Victoria municipal election.
Caradonna has been unusually transparent about his political views. The following are direct, verbatim quotations from his own published statements, platform documents, and media interviews.
“Victoria has not yet come to terms with its role in this genocidal history. Victoria can be doing more to implement UNDRIP at the municipal level.”
— Jeremy Caradonna, VoteMate, 2022
“Victoria should continue to work towards reconciliation by returning stolen lands to First Nations, wherever possible and appropriate.”
— Jeremy Caradonna, VoteMate, 2022
“It is really crucial that the city support Indigenous-led housing through meaningful partnerships with Indigenous organizations.”
— Jeremy Caradonna, VoteMate, 2022
“I do get tirades and I would say a lot of it, in my experience, has to do with development and people who feel under assault in their comfortable, single-family-home lifestyle.”
— Jeremy Caradonna, Times Colonist, June 2023
“Community associations are stacked with ‘single-family home truthers,’ yet wield great power over decision making.”
— Jeremy Caradonna, Capital Daily, 2023
“We already had the most progressive missing middle policy in North America.”
— Jeremy Caradonna, LinkedIn, 2023
On his current re-election campaign biography, Caradonna claims credit for several reconciliation-portfolio accomplishments during his first term: co-funding the annual South Island Powwow, working with Songhees and Xwsepsum Nations on land-back and land-use matters, the agreement to fly Songhees and Xwsepsum Nation flags outside City Hall, and supporting the Te’mexw Treaty Association negotiations. Three Crown land parcels within the City of Victoria are currently identified as on the table in the Songhees treaty negotiations: 613/615 Pandora (already transferred), 1112 Wharf Street, and 430 Menzies Street.
Conduct
Caradonna’s conduct in office, separate from his policy positions, is also a matter of public record. The most consequential single moment came on August 3, 2023, when Council debated the City of Victoria’s Code of Conduct bylaw. City staff had recommended that any individual be permitted to file a complaint about councillor conduct. An amendment moved by Councillor Dave Thompson, supported by Caradonna, Dell, Loughton, and Kim, narrowed the complaint authority to council members, city staff, and committee members only. Members of the public were excluded from the process governing the conduct of officials they had elected.
Mayor Marianne Alto, who had pushed for a Code of Conduct for nearly a decade, opposed the amendment on the record. She told Council:
“This is narrowing far too dramatically.”
— Mayor Marianne Alto, Times Colonist, August 4, 2023
Councillor Marg Gardiner also opposed it. She told Council:
“I just find it breaks even the whole concept of what we were trying to do, which was to open up and become a more transparent, or at least I hope we were a more transparent, municipal council. We need something, a way that the general public can come forward.”
— Councillor Marg Gardiner, Times Colonist, August 4, 2023
Thompson’s stated justification for the amendment was striking. Per the Times Colonist:
“If anyone is looking at social media, they will see that there is a pattern of people fabricating stories in order to do what’s called rage farming. So, I have no doubt that that would happen here.”
— Councillor Dave Thompson, Times Colonist, August 4, 2023
The amendment passed. The bylaw was adopted in fall 2023 as Bylaw No. 23-058. Thompson’s stated reason for excluding the public from filing complaints about elected officials was that members of the public might file complaints. The premise that this is something a Code of Conduct should prevent rather than process is the premise the amendment institutionalised.
The practical effect, also documented, has been to shut public complaints out of the Code of Conduct process. In a December 2025 Times Colonist follow-up, Andrew A. Duffy reported that the city had received only one complaint from a person authorised to file under the bylaw, while several attempts from members of the public had been received and rejected. Councillor Gardiner is on the record describing the operative bylaw as having been used ‘as a weapon, a shadow, a threat, a chill,’ and the exclusion of the public as undemocratic. In January 2026, a motion to restore direct public filing access was brought before Council. It was defeated. Council declined a second opportunity to undo the 2023 narrowing.
Selective Recusal
In November 2025, Caradonna recused himself from a Council vote on the 50 Government Street development application, explicitly citing the perception of bias as the grounds for recusal. The 50 Government Street recusal demonstrates that Caradonna understands the legal mechanism of recusal and has invoked the perception-of-bias standard when he judged it warranted. He did not recuse on the August 2023 Code of Conduct vote, where the matter directly governed his own personal accountability to the public, nor on the January 2026 vote on whether to restore that public access. The Committee for Justice and Liberty v. National Energy Board test, which establishes the reasonable-apprehension-of-bias standard in Canadian administrative and municipal law, asks whether a reasonable person, viewing the matter realistically and practically, could conclude that the decision-maker’s vote was impartial. The contrast between Caradonna’s recusal practice on a third-party development application and his non-recusal practice on the bylaw governing his own conduct is now on the public record.
Hammond and the Apology
On January 23, 2025, during Council debate on the Crystal Pool referendum, Caradonna called fellow Councillor Stephen Hammond a liar. Hammond, in a Times Colonist op-ed published February 1, 2025, demanded an apology and noted that he had legal options available to him for what he characterised as defamatory language. He further reported that when he attempted to bring an apology motion to the agenda, Caradonna, along with Thompson, Kim, and Dell, voted against placing it on the agenda. On February 7, 2025, Caradonna apologised at Council. The Times Colonist’s Andrew A. Duffy covered both the original incident, Hammond’s response, and the eventual apology in three separate news stories.
On the asymmetry of scrutiny
Caradonna immigrated from the United States to Canada as an adult. He has, as a sitting Canadian municipal councillor, called for Canadian land to be returned to First Nations and described the city he was elected to represent as failing to come to terms with its genocidal colonial history. These are substantive political positions, advanced by an elected official, advocating territorial transfers in a country he is not from by birth.
Whether such positions, advanced by an immigrant politician on questions of Canadian territorial sovereignty, should generate political scrutiny is a question Canadian discourse has not handled symmetrically. Equivalent positions advanced by an immigrant politician from a country currently the subject of federal foreign-interference inquiry would receive substantially greater public attention and media examination. Caradonna’s American birthplace, US graduate-school credential, and immigration trajectory through the BC environmental and reconciliation policy ecosystem have not generated comparable scrutiny. The asymmetry is real. It may say more about the categories Canadian political discourse uses to triage newcomer voices on questions of sovereignty than about Caradonna himself. It is documented here because it is a real feature of how the ecosystem operates, and because the absence of scrutiny is itself a structural fact.
The pattern this section documents, Caradonna’s positions on Indigenous sovereignty, the bloc voting to remove and then maintain the public’s exclusion from the Code of Conduct process, the selective recusal practice, and the Hammond incident, is a record now established in primary source. Whether it constitutes unethical conduct is a question for British Columbians, not for any document published by an investigative project. The record is what is being documented.
The Lobbying Gap
Section 2(1)(d) of BC’s Lobbyists Transparency Act explicitly excludes from coverage members of municipal councils, regional district boards, and other local government authorities. Municipal councillors and CRD Directors in BC are not required to register lobbyist meetings. There is no provincial lobbying registry that captures local-government interactions. The City of Victoria does not run one. The Union of British Columbia Municipalities has not adopted a model bylaw for municipal lobbying disclosure.
BC’s Lobbyist Registry, which does cover provincial officials, contains documented entries of direct lobbying contact between Dogwood Initiative and Murray Rankin during his ministerial tenure. Per the BC Office of the Registrar of Lobbyists, Dogwood Initiative’s Forest Futures project lobbied Rankin in his capacity as Minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation and as MLA for Oak Bay-Gordon Head, with recorded activities in January 2021 and December 2021. The subject matter was environment and Indigenous relations, particularly forest management and climate policy. The same Dogwood Initiative was a registered third-party sponsor in the 2022 Victoria municipal election that produced the Council slate including Diana Gibson’s husband Dave Thompson. Dogwood’s Operations Director is Matt Takach, the registered designated filer for the organisation. The same registry shows that on March 7, 2025, Diana Gibson, then JEDI Minister, was lobbied by Savannah Barratt of Dogwood Initiative, Lobbying Activity number 3244-40436.
The practical effect of the lobbying gap: a network of policy consultants, environmental advocates, Indigenous-impact firms, and former provincial staffers can move in and out of Victoria municipal decision-making rooms with no public record kept of who spoke to whom, when, or about what. The provincial registry captures the Cabinet-level traffic; the municipal level is dark.
The Loop Closes: the same firm on both sides
Ben Isitt sat on Victoria City Council from December 2011 to October 2022. Three terms. He holds a PhD in History from UVic, an LLB from the University of London, and a PhD in Law from UVic. Admitted to the BC Bar on October 1, 2022. His political relationship with Murray Rankin predates Council. In the 2012 federal NDP nomination contest in Victoria following Denise Savoie’s resignation, Isitt was one of Rankin’s opponents; Rankin won with 352 votes, Isitt finished fourth with 36. In 2018 to 2019 Isitt publicly supported a pro bono legal opinion drafted for the City by Joseph Arvay of Arvay Finlay LLP on potential fossil fuel litigation, and withdrew a competing UBCM resolution in deference to Arvay’s work. Isitt did not return to Council in 2022, ran for the federal NDP nomination in Victoria in the 2025 federal election, and now operates Benjamin Isitt Law Corporation. He resigned from a CRD Indigenous committee in 2022 after Pacheedaht First Nation raised concerns regarding his conduct.
Isitt is the named lawyer for the Save Record Ridge Action Committee Society in the BC Supreme Court litigation over the proposed Record Ridge magnesium mine near Rossland, BC. The Save Record Ridge Action Committee is allied with the Sinixt Confederacy. Per the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2021 ruling in R. v. Desautel, the Sinixt are recognised as Aboriginal Peoples of Canada with rights protected under section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, despite being a tribe of the United States-based Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation in Washington State. The current Chairman of both the Sinixt Confederacy and the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation is Jarred-Michael Erickson.
Arvay Finlay on the same side as Ben Isitt
The Sinixt Confederacy is represented in the Record Ridge judicial review by Julia Riddle, an associate at Arvay Finlay LLP. The same firm Murray Rankin co-founded in 1990 with Joseph Arvay, the firm to which Rankin returned as Counsel in 2024 after retiring from cabinet, is now co-counsel with Isitt on the same side of the Record Ridge litigation. Arvay Finlay’s institutional relationship with the Sinixt is not new. The firm’s Mark Underhill and Kate Phipps represented Richard Desautel through four levels of court, including to the Supreme Court of Canada in 2021, in the litigation that established Sinixt status as Aboriginal Peoples of Canada in the first place. The firm Rankin co-founded helped establish, through Desautel, the constitutional doctrine that the Sinixt are now invoking to challenge BC’s failure to consult them under the DRIPA framework Rankin himself implemented as Minister.
Justice Dev Dley granted an interim injunction on March 11, 2026, pausing construction at Record Ridge. Justice Paul Riley subsequently rejected West High Yield Resources’ application to lift the injunction and to remove the Sinixt Confederacy from the proceeding. Both the BC Supreme Court and the BC Court of Appeal have upheld the Sinixt’s right to participate. The judicial review was heard May 5 to 7, 2026 in Rossland, before Justice Gordon C. Weatherill. Decision is expected in mid-June 2026. The core issue is whether the BC Environmental Assessment Office acted reasonably in not requiring an environmental assessment after West High Yield progressively reduced its stated production capacity from 400,000 to 63,500 tonnes per year while the physical footprint remained largely unchanged. In November 2025, Isitt filed with the federal Minister of Environment requesting designation under the Impact Assessment Act.
In court filings reported by Trail Times in October 2025, Isitt’s group argued:
“By disregarding expert findings and the broader record, the province failed in its duty to protect the public interest.”
— Save Record Ridge Action Committee filings, October 2025
The Save Record Ridge Action Committee Society is primarily GoFundMe-funded; no foundation grants have been located in available sources. Its directors include Melanie Mercier, Nils French, and Elissa Ferguson, who received the City of Rossland Community Contributor Award in December 2025. The plaintiff side is grassroots-funded; the law firm representing the co-litigant Sinixt Confederacy is the firm Rankin founded.
The implementer of the framework is in private practice at the Victoria firm he co-founded. A former Victoria councillor, who shared 2022 endorsement slates with the spouse of the implementer’s successor, is now the named lawyer suing the province under the framework. An associate at the implementer’s firm represents the Sinixt Confederacy as co-counsel on the same side. The MLA who succeeded the implementer, who was herself a registered BC government lobbyist three years before joining cabinet, sits in cabinet today as Minister of Citizens’ Services overseeing the Indigenous Procurement Initiative. Her husband and his slate colleagues vote on the framework’s municipal implementation from Victoria Council and the CRD. The Indigenous-impact consulting firm the husband co-founded supplies the kind of research that surfaces when these cases reach court, and is on the BC government supplier list. An American Indigenous tribe based in Washington State, recognised in Canada through doctrine established by lawyers at the implementer’s firm, is a party to the litigation. The same firm appears on both sides of the loop.
The Trajectory
Premier David Eby, who was Attorney General when DRIPA was drafted in November 2019, announced in April 2026 (per CBC News) that the BC government would suspend certain sections of DRIPA following the BC Court of Appeal’s Gitxaala ruling, 2025 BCCA 430, which held in a 2-1 split that DRIPA incorporates UNDRIP into BC positive law with immediate effect and declared the mineral claims regime inconsistent with UNDRIP Article 32(2). The proposal was met with what news coverage described as complete opposition from First Nations leaders. BC filed leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada in February 2026. Per CBC’s reporting, more than twenty active provincial lawsuits have been amended to invoke DRIPA-derived doctrine. The August 2025 Cowichan Tribes decision (2025 BCSC 1490, 863 pages, 513 trial days) is now under appeal. Aggregate litigation costs in that case alone are estimated at approaching or exceeding $100 million. Lead counsel for the Quw’utsun was David M. Robbins (Woodward and Company) and David Rosenberg KC; no Arvay Finlay appearance in that case has been documented in available sources, and no Firelight research has been documented in that record.
Reconciliation in BC is no longer just a policy direction. It is a sector. It generates litigation, consulting fees, regulatory work, and political careers. The implementer of the legal framework that opened that sector and the people positioned around the framework he implemented now occupy nearly every relevant institutional role: Rankin in private practice using the framework at the firm he co-founded, with that firm now appearing as co-counsel against the province under the framework; Eby as Premier defending the broader DRIPA architecture; Gibson in cabinet, in the ministry that oversees Indigenous procurement, after a path through Firelight, Parkland, the Community Social Planning Council, and a registered lobbyist seat at the same government she now serves in; Thompson and Caradonna voting on municipal compliance from Victoria Council and the CRD, with Thompson and Kim seated on the Centre for Civic Governance Advisory Council whose chair is also national NDP Treasurer; Rotchford, the Labour Council president who endorsed the slate, sitting now as a BC NDP MLA; Isitt suing under the framework on behalf of an American Indigenous tribe based in Washington State, alongside the firm Rankin co-founded. The same eco-progressive infrastructure that elected the municipal slate continues to back the next generation.
The Arvay Finlay Victoria office at 360-1070 Douglas Street, the Firelight Group’s Victoria office, Victoria City Hall at 1 Centennial Square, and the BC Legislature on Belleville Street are all within a forty-minute walk of one another. The activist ecosystem around Victoria City Hall, anchored at UVic, sustained by overlapping endorsements from VCAT and the District Labour Council, networked through the BC NDP, the BC Federation of Labour, and a small set of Indigenous-impact and public-policy consulting firms, is the engine of provincial Indigenous-rights and climate policy. Most British Columbians do not see it operating, because most of it operates without a registry.
That is what this account documents.
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Sources
On Rankin
• Black Press Media, retirement interview, June 2024
• Victoria Buzz, June 3, 2024
• arvayfinlay.ca/murray-rankin
• BC government press releases, Ministry of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation, 2020-2024
• BC Office of the Registrar of Lobbyists, lobbying records for Dogwood Initiative (Forest Futures), January 2021 and December 2021, with Hon. Murray Rankin as Designated Public Office Holder
• Canadian Centre for Environmental Arbitration and Mediation, May 2025
On Gibson
• Victoria Times Colonist candidate questionnaire, October 2024
• Victoria Buzz, June 3, 2024
• Business in Vancouver, October 17, 2024
• Elections BC published candidate financial returns, 2024 BC general election, Oak Bay-Gordon Head
• BC government cabinet announcements, November 18, 2024 and July 17, 2025
• BC Office of the Registrar of Lobbyists, in-house lobbyist registration for Diana Gibson, Community Social Planning Council of Greater Victoria, registered November 29, 2021
• Steager, T.Y. (2015). Firelight Group Project Experience Portfolio. SlideShare
• Canadian Energy Regulator document A75949-2 (BRFN Written Evidence on Coastal GasLink, footnote 33)
• CEAA document repository, Jackpine Mine Expansion JRP, ACFN Supplemental Submission, Appendix D Part 5
On Thompson and PolicyLink
• BC Statement of Disclosure under the Financial Disclosure Act, David Scott Thompson, signed January 14, 2026
• policylink.ca/about
• City of Victoria councillor profile, victoria.ca
• Candler, C. and Thompson, D. with The Firelight Group (2015). Indigenous Traditional Knowledge Framework. CEMA Contract 2014-0005, approved December 2, 2015
On Firelight
• firelight.ca
• BC Public Accounts FY 2024-2025, Schedule of Payments to Suppliers ($118,447 to Firelight Research Inc.)
• Bhattacharyya, J. and Whittaker, C. with The Firelight Group (2016). Priorities and Needs for First Nations Establishing Indigenous Protected Areas in BC, Phase 1: Scoping Study. Funded by Wilburforce Foundation
• BC Indigenous Procurement Initiative, Ministry of Citizens’ Services published policy materials
On the Centre for Civic Governance
• Columbia Institute and Centre for Civic Governance published Advisory Council and board materials
• BC Federation of Labour leadership records, 2022 election of Sussanne Skidmore as President
• Federal NDP and BC NDP published officer rosters
On Caradonna’s positions and conduct
• Caradonna 2022 campaign biography (Seattle birthplace; Edmonton 2008-2012; Victoria from 2012)
• VoteMate 2022 candidate platform
• Victoria Times Colonist, June 27, 2023 (death threats interview)
• Capital Daily, January 2023 (community-association quote)
• LinkedIn, 2023
• electjeremy.ca current campaign website
• BC government employment records (Climate Action Secretariat 2019-2020; Office of Mass Timber Implementation 2020-2022)
• Times Colonist, August 4, 2023 (Code of Conduct vote, Alto and Gardiner quotes, Thompson ‘rage farming’ quote)
• Times Colonist, December 2025 (Code of Conduct practical effect, Gardiner quotes)
• Times Colonist, January 29, 2025 and February 7, 2025 (Hammond apology incident)
• City of Victoria meeting records (50 Government Street recusal, November 2025; January 2026 motion to restore public complaint access, defeated)
• City of Victoria Bylaw No. 23-058
On the slate, the Labour Council, and Mayor Alto
• Victoria Climate Action Team 2022 endorsement materials
• Victoria & District Labour Council 2022 endorsement materials
• Marianne Alto published BC NDP party-officer history
• Carole James 2022 endorsement statement for Alto mayoral campaign
• Elections BC, Esquimalt-Colwood 2024 general election results (Darlene Rotchford)
• BC government Parliamentary Secretary appointments, 2024-2026
On the lobbying gap and Dogwood
• BC Lobbyists Transparency Act, s. 2(1)(d)
• BC Lobbyist Registry, Dogwood Initiative (Forest Futures) lobbying records, January 2021 and December 2021 (Rankin)
• BC Lobbyist Registry, Lobbying Activity 3244-40436 (Diana Gibson lobbied by Savannah Barratt of Dogwood Initiative, March 7, 2025)
On Isitt and Save Record Ridge
• Globe and Mail, October-November 2025
• Trail Times, October 2025
• R. v. Desautel, 2021 SCC 17 (Sinixt status as Aboriginal Peoples of Canada)
• BC Supreme Court interim injunction, Justice Dev Dley, March 11, 2026
• BC Supreme Court ruling on West High Yield application, Justice Paul Riley, April 2026
• BC Supreme Court judicial review hearing, Justice Gordon C. Weatherill, May 5-7, 2026, Rossland
• isitt.ca
• Times Colonist, 2022 (Pacheedaht concerns and CRD Indigenous committee resignation)
On Arvay Finlay’s role
• arvayfinlay.ca/team and arvayfinlay.ca/news
• BC Supreme Court filings in Save Record Ridge Action Committee Society judicial review (Julia Riddle for Sinixt Confederacy)
• R. v. Desautel, 2021 SCC 17 (Mark Underhill and Kate Phipps as counsel)
On the broader DRIPA litigation context
• CBC News, April 2026 (Eby DRIPA suspension announcement)
• Cowichan Tribes v. Canada (Attorney General), 2025 BCSC 1490
• Yahey v British Columbia, 2021 BCSC 1287
• Gitxaala Nation v British Columbia (Chief Gold Commissioner), 2023 BCSC 1680
• Gitxaala Nation v British Columbia (Chief Gold Commissioner), 2025 BCCA 430
• Tsilhqot’in Nation v British Columbia, 2014 SCC 44
* * *
Disclaimer
No wrongdoing is alleged in this account. All relationships, statements, votes, and quotations described are documented in the public record and sourced. The point of this documentation is structural: a single small geographic and professional network is positioned around BC’s most significant piece of Indigenous-rights legislation from every angle of public life. That fact is on the public record. Whether the conduct of any individual within that network rises to the level of unethical, or whether the structure itself warrants greater scrutiny, are questions for British Columbians.
BCPoliticsWatch is an independent civic accountability research project covering municipal and provincial politics in British Columbia.