In 2007 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, commonly referred to as UNDRIP, after watering down the declaration drafted in 1994 by Indigenous nations globally into a version that could be acceptable to European-style Westphalian states, including settler colonial states like Canada. For the Indigenous writers, the original declaration was to be a legal basis for Indigenous sovereignty against the colonial power of nation states. But for UN member states UNDRIP was a stop-gap, meant to fill the silence of the UN’s 1946 Universal Declaration of Human Rights about the specific rights of Indigenous peoples. The most forceful sections of the version of the declaration passed in 2007 bear the marks of its original creators, recognizing Indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination and the principle of free, prior and informed consent.

In 2016, well into the era of reconciliation, the Liberal government declared support for the spirit of UNDRIP. By December 2020, Prime Minister Trudeau introduced Bill C-15, known as “CANDRIP,” which proposes to implement UNDRIP with Canada’s settler colonial characteristics.

Indigenous critics of CANDRIP argue that Bill C-15 does not actually put the UN Declaration into law, but instead uses it to undermine nation to nation relations between Canada and Indigenous nations, and in doing so undermines Indigenous sovereign rights by subordinating Indigenous rights to a Canadian constitutional framework.

Full Article