When David Frum Calls Indigenous Rights a “Misstep,” He Is Defending Colonialism

David Frum’s publication this week “Good Intentions Gone Bad” in The Atlantic wants readers to believe that recognizing Indigenous land rights is an unfortunate mistake — an ill-timed indulgence that threatens economic growth just when the country needs it most. He writes that the courts are “inventing new obstacles to development,” as if the existence of Indigenous peoples, laws, and title were a bureaucratic glitch rather than the foundational reality of this land.

That sentence alone tells us everything we need to know about his worldview.

Indigenous rights are not obstacles. They are the reason Canada exists in the first place. They are the suppressed foundation beneath every city, railway, pipeline, subdivision, and corporate balance sheet in this country. To frame their recognition as a threat is not merely wrong — it is racist, colonial, and dangerous.

Frum’s argument is built on a fiction that Canada’s courts are suddenly indulging in activism, conjuring new barriers where none existed before. In truth, the courts are doing the slow, overdue work of acknowledging what Indigenous nations have always known: that they never surrendered their lands, never extinguished their sovereignty, and never consented to the economic order built on their displacement.

This is not moral poetry. It is constitutional law.

Section 35 of the Constitution Act does not offer Indigenous peoples sympathy. It recognizes and affirms their rights. That language was not chosen lightly. It exists because Canada knows that its legitimacy is incomplete — because it was constructed on lands taken without lawful extinguishment. When the Supreme Court in cases like Delgamuukw and Tsilhqot’in Nation confirmed that Indigenous title is real, enforceable, and prior to Crown sovereignty, it was not creating instability. It was restoring coherence to a legal system that had long pretended Indigenous law did not exist.

In Tsilhqot’in, the Court did something radical only to those invested in colonial denial: it said Indigenous nations have the right to decide how their lands are used. Not to be consulted as a courtesy, not to be heard and ignored, but to give or withhold consent unless the Crown can justify infringement under the strictest constitutional standards.

Frum does not argue against this law directly, because he cannot. Instead, he reframes it as a threat to “economic growth.” This is the oldest trick in the colonial book — turning justice into an inconvenience and dispossession into pragmatism.

When Frum speaks of growth, he does not ask: growth for whom? For the descendants of settlers whose wealth was built on treaty violations? For multinational corporations that externalize environmental harm onto Indigenous communities? For governments desperate to monetize land they never owned?

He speaks as though the Canadian economy exists in a vacuum, untethered from the fact that Indigenous peoples were forcibly removed from the very territories that now generate this so-called growth. The roads that connect our cities cut through unceded lands. The banks that finance extraction profit from titles rooted in theft. The prosperity Frum defends is inseparable from the dispossession he refuses to name.

And now, as Indigenous nations assert rights grounded in both constitutional and international law — including the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which Canada has formally adopted — Frum tells us this is too much. That we should pause justice until the economy feels more comfortable.

That is not analysis. That is panic from a worldview finally being held to account.

UNDRIP affirms that Indigenous peoples have the right to free, prior, and informed consent over developments affecting their territories. Consent is not a speed bump. It is the corrective to centuries of unilateral decision-making that treated Indigenous land as terra nullius — empty, ownerless, available for the taking.

What Frum mourns is not the slowing of development. It is the slowing of unchecked power.

Calling Indigenous resistance an “obstacle” reveals the racial hierarchy embedded in his thinking: that the default future of this country is settler control, and anything that disrupts that flow must be a problem to be solved.

But the real problem is not Indigenous rights.

The problem is that Canada is finally being asked to live with the truth that its wealth is incomplete without justice, that its legal system is incoherent without Indigenous law, and that reconciliation is not a branding exercise but a reckoning.

If recognizing Indigenous land title destabilizes the economy, then the economy was never legitimate to begin with.

If consultation feels burdensome, it is because we are no longer allowed to take what is not ours without consequence.

David Frum is not warning us about economic risk. He is warning us that the era of comfortable colonial entitlement is ending — and he does not like it.

But that era should end.

Because Indigenous rights are not obstacles to Canada’s future.

They are the only honest foundation it has left.