The TRC Calls to Action in BC Municipalities

Since the TRC Calls to Action were published in 2015, implementation has been all too slow and has primarily resulted from the advocacy, labour, and determination of Indigenous communities. This is not a sustainable path toward reconciliation. We have heard from Indigenous communities that settlers and settler-led organizations must step up and contribute to ensuring the Calls to Action are realized.

As an organization, we considered what that looks like for us and how we can apply our knowledge, experience, relationships and expertise working at the local government level to advance the Calls to Action. After discussion with Indigenous partners and organizations, we recognized that whilst there are great organizations such as Yellowhead Institute and Indigenous Watchdog tracking federal and provincial governments' progress on the Calls to Action, there is little tracking at the local level.

Understanding what progress has been made on the Calls to Action that relate to local government is essential, and tracking is a powerful tool: it is difficult to improve what we don’t measure. It also helps identify common challenges and what is required to overcome them.

As a settler-led organization, we have listened to the voices of Indigenous leaders, especially Indigenous women, and taken leadership from Indigenous communities throughout this work. WTC’s board of directors alumni Kukdooka Terri Brown, who served for six years on the TRC’s Indian Residential School Survivor Committee, encouraged WTC to conduct this work and shaped the project from its inception. In addition to taking leadership from Terri, we met with several Indigenous organizations and leaders from across the country to ask for their advice and input, update them on our progress, and understand how we could ensure this project would best serve their communities’ needs. We are grateful to all whose knowledge and expertise shaped this initiative.

We also aimed to find a balance between seeking guidance from Indigenous communities and avoiding unnecessarily burdening them by being conscientious of their engagement capacity. Indigenous leaders receive many requests for their labour from settlers, which can take them away from work within their own communities. Therefore, we have opted to be selective about asking for Indigenous people's labour unless we were providing compensation. As activist Harsha Walia writes:

“Respecting Indigenous leadership is not the same as waiting around to be told what to do while you do nothing… seeking guidance must be weighed against the possibility of further burdening Indigenous people with questions. The appropriate line between being too interventionist and being paralyzed will be aided by a willingness to decenter oneself, and learning and acting from a place of responsibility rather than guilt."

Striking this balance has been a guiding principle in this work––and it is one that we encourage local governments to incorporate into their reconciliation journey too.

There are many Calls to Action that local governments can progress. Each Call names specific institutions or levels of government. We focused our research on those explicitly directed at municipalities or “all levels of government.” Amongst these, we selected ten that were most relevant to the largest number of BC municipalities and that represented a variety of policy areas within which local governments can address the legacy of colonialism. These 10 are a starting point––there are many additional ways local leaders can advance reconciliation.

We were conscious that completing the self-assessment survey was many participants’ first or most substantive exposure to the Calls to Action. In addition to gathering data, we aimed to familiarise participants with the TRC's Calls and encourage reflection on further actions they could take in their communities.

Our approach to this research was to put the onus on settler governments to reflect on and determine their level of progress rather than burdening Indigenous communities with this work. However, we want to be clear about the limitations of this methodology: the results are based on municipalities’ own perception of their progress on the Calls to Action. Indigenous communities within or near these municipalities have not verified this progress.

This research is a starting point that we hope will prompt further examination rooted in specific local communities, as Indigenous communities themselves are the only ones that can truly determine when a Call to Action is complete.

This research included outreach to all 162 incorporated municipalities in BC. While we did not conduct direct outreach to regional districts in this initial research, they have a critical role in implementing the TRC Calls to Action. Our focus on municipal leaders in this research was partly informed by resource constraints; as a small, grant-funded organization we did not have capacity to survey regional districts in addition to municipalities.

However, this focus was also informed by strategic considerations and mission alignment. Much of our work as an organization is focused on increasing access to civic engagement for those who face barriers to political participation. Through this work, we’ve found that municipalities are more accessible to the communities we serve than regional districts and provide more direct avenues for public input. As one of the goals of this initiative is to empower residents to seek further action on TRC implementation in their community, it made sense to focus on the bodies that they are more likely and more equipped to engage with: city halls.

Furthermore, as regional districts include directors from municipal governments, we hope this initiative will also prompt municipal elected officials to facilitate further action at the regional level. For example, one result of residents advocating at the municipal level could be for Council resolutions to communicate this priority and push for additional actions at the regional district level through their appointed director. While this is the first research of this nature that has been conducted at a province-wide scale, we hope it will not be the last. We aim for this type of initiative to be replicable in other areas, which could also include an examination of regional districts’ progress and barriers.

The Calls to Action are for all of us––and regional districts have an integral role to play. Many are already leading critical work in this area. The overlap between the territories they occupy and First Nations linguistic and cultural groups offers a compelling opportunity for engagement on the Calls to Action. Many examples of on-the-ground action we’ve identified in this report apply to regional districts and municipalities. We urge regional district directors to explore and advance these initiatives to advance the Calls to Action.

In conducting this research, it was important to encourage as many municipalities as possible to complete our survey and gather data representative of various levels of progress made by municipalities. Therefore, to increase survey responses, including from those reluctant to publicly report their progress on the Calls, municipalities were told that their responses would be anonymized when shared publicly.

If you are interested in knowing whether your municipality responded to the survey and what actions they have taken, we urge you to email your mayor and council requesting this information. You could also suggest that they direct staff to publicly share annual reports on their progress on the Calls to Action. If elected officials know that residents in their community value transparency and accountability on TRC implementation, they are more likely to take concrete action.

If you are a resident interested in exploring a local campaign to advance the TRC Calls to Action in your community, Women Transforming Cities would like to support you! Please reach out, and we can provide targeted advice and support depending on the size of your community and your desired outcomes

If you are part of an Indigenous community or organization and would like to learn more about the data from a specific region and how it was collected, please contact clara@womentransformingcities.org. We are committed to facilitating data sovereignty in occupied territories.

Your elected mayor and councillors are there to represent you and the issues that matter to your community. Residents have an essential role in ensuring local councils know that the TRC Calls to Action are a priority for their community. Here are some ways you can take action:

• Email or phone your elected officials to tell them that implementation of the Calls to Action, UNDRIP, and the MMIWG Calls for Justice are a priority for you. Bring it up if you see them out in the community.

• Send this report to your Council to start a conversation on how they can take action.

• Ask your elected officials, or candidates during an election, if they have read the TRC Calls to Action and the final report.

• Amplify and support Indigenous organizations in your local community––ask if specific Calls to Action are a priority for them.

• Periodically ask for updates on the progress your local government is making on implementing the Calls to Action––repeated requests will signal that it's a sustained concern.

• Organize a group of friends and family to speak at Council meetings or meet one-on-one with a Councillor to emphasize your desire for progress on the Calls to Action.

• Take a look at your local government's annual operational budget and see if their commitments to reconciliation are adequately resourced. Remind Council that reconciliation isn’t free and urge them to invest in this work.

Women Transforming Cities is eager to support mayors, councillors, directors, and staff in advancing the Calls to Action. Whether it’s a tailored workshop about some or all of the Calls to Action we identified in our research, brainstorming opportunities to go further with this work, or simply discussing and working through some of the barriers you face in your community, we are here to support you.

If there are specific examples or ideas from our report that you are interested in pursuing in your own community, we would be happy to connect you with local government leaders to facilitate peer learning or other organizations and leaders with lived experience and expertise in that area.

Please reach out if you have any questions, feedback, or ideas for further work on the Calls to Action in local communities that we can support. We would love to hear from you.