A Vancouver city councillor demonstrated earlier this summer that colonialism is alive and well at City Hall.

For the second time this year, councillor Colleen Hardwick voted in July against the city’s reconciliation efforts with First Nations, while minimizing the role that local governments have to play in dismantling colonialism.

Hardwick, who ran with the Non-Partisan Association municipal party, was the only councillor who rejected the council staff’s City of Reconciliation report, which states the local government’s aim is to “continually move towards the goal of reconciliation” with “the Musqueam Indian Band, Squamish Nation and Tsleil-Waututh Nation.”

Though Hardwick didn’t explain her opposition to the report during the council meeting, she subsequently said in an interview with the Vancouver Sun’s Dan Fumano:

“When are we reconciled? How much is about atoning? And what are the implications in terms of land and money?”

Hardwick also appeared to question whether municipal government has any role at all in reconciliation work.

“Are we a local government? Or are we a values-based organization?” she said. “I just wish there was more education and a little less ideology.”

According to Fumano, Hardwick’s objection to the city’s reconciliation efforts reflects a broader concern about “scope-creep,” supposedly shared by “a significant number of Vancouverites.”

“She says Vancouver City Hall has, especially over the last decade, dedicated money and effort to issues that would traditionally be the realm of provincial or federal governments,” Fumano wrote.

Following pushback over her comments, Hardwick later said in a statement on Facebook that she “100 percent supports the City’s commitment to being a City of Reconciliation.”

“I believe we need to clearly define the role all levels of government have in reaching true reconciliation,” she added. “It is important that we consider how the City of Vancouver can move forward in fulfilling our commitment to reconciliation, while also considering the roles and responsibilities of other levels of government.”

But the NPA councillor’s most recent stand against the city’s reconciliation efforts follows an emerging pattern. Back in March, Hardwick voted against her own motion to make April 6 “Vancouver’s official birthday,” because of a strike-and-replace amendment moved by Green councillor Pete Fry, who proposed directing council staff to prepare a “fulsome analysis of an appropriate date, location, and form of recognition to celebrate a Vancouver Day that considers the full historical context of Vancouver’s incorporation and history with a reconciliation lens.”

As COPE councillor Jean Swanson pointed out, Vancouver’s official incorporation date marked “the birthday of a catastrophe for First Nations people.” Fry’s amendment (which passed) allowed the city to determine an appropriate way to, as per the motion, acknowledge “the 1886 expropriation of lands around the traditional villages of Sen̓ áḵw (aka Vanier Park) and `X̱wáýx̱way (aka Stanley Park); and the collective experiences and histories of people of colour and immigrants who also helped to build our city.”

However, before voting against that amendment, Hardwick said, “I certainly wasn’t looking to turn it into the complicated exercise that it’s become,” adding, “I must say I’m disappointed at the direction that it’s taking.”

Clearly, Hardwick’s concerns go deeper than so-called scope-creep.

And while the NPA councillor’s skepticism of the city’s reconciliation work follows the received wisdom of those who would prefer to phase out such work from city governments altogether, it ignores the fact that local authorities in British Columbia were, and are, instrumental in putting racist colonial ideologies into effect.

For example, a decade-old study by historian Jordan Stanger-Ross pointed out that during the 1930s and 1940s, Vancouver city bureaucrats worked tirelessly to stake claims over the Kitsilano and Musqueam Reserves under the pretext that Indigenous spaces supposedly “impeded growth and threatened urban vitality.” Those actions meant city officials effectively developed their own “distinctive form of municipal colonialism.”

Some local authorities in B.C. have recently made symbolic efforts to repudiate some of those colonial foundations.

For example, Victoria city council voted to remove a statue of John A. MacDonald (a chief architect of the residential school system) from the steps of City Hall last year. Vancouver’s Park Board, meanwhile, approved an audit of its past actions, including its theft of ancestral lands in traditional Coast Salish territories. And last month, New Westminster council voted to remove a statue of Matthew Begbie, a chief justice who sentenced six Indigenous leaders to death in 1864.

However, while important, those gestures remain largely symbolic, and do not in themselves fully implement all the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 2015 Calls to Action, which made five recommendations to municipal governments.

Notably, one of those recommendations reads:

“We call upon federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal governments to repudiate concepts used to justify European sovereignty over Indigenous peoples and lands, such as the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius, and to reform those laws, government policies, and litigation strategies that continue to rely on such concepts.”

The “Doctrine of Discovery,” originating in the 1400s, is the legal and moral fallacy used to justify dispossession of sovereign Indigenous Nations. The Vancouver City of Reconciliation report responded to the TRC’s call to repudiate that doctrine by acknowledging, as of June 2014, that the city exists today on the unceded traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.

But as UBC law professor and Toquaht Nation citizen Johnny Mack explained, the TRC’s recommendation asks public institutions to go much further than that by actively recognizing Indigenous peoples as a “partner authority in all forms of governance and decision-making that affect their interests.”

“This is a large ask, and one that demands a reconsideration of the norms we rely on to legitimate institutional decision-making from the ground up,” he told Ricochet. “The challenge now is how to recognize Aboriginal rights in a way that does not carry forward the presumptions of the discovery doctrine.”

The scope of the task at hand goes far beyond the motions that Hardwick objected to this year. However, if she and others cannot accept even the most basic attempts at acknowledging the colonial foundations of Canada’s municipal institutions, why should anyone trust that some local authorities are up to the task of reconciliation, let alone decolonization?