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Now there is in an opportunity to fulfil the heady optimism of the Charter debates and respectfully resolve land claims and treaty implementation.
People were strewn exhausted across Ed Broadbent’s grand old parliamentary office on sofas, window ledges and desks. It was near the end of an intense four-hour negotiating session with some of Canada’s most important First Nations leaders and their lawyers. There was a sense that a consensus was finally, perhaps, possible.
Suddenly, one of the young lawyers stood up and said, “No, this is not good enough. Let’s take a break.” Many of the tired participants looked up in shock and then anger. I followed the young Vancouver lawyer into the hall. We stared angrily at each other in silence.
Then he said, slowly, “Look, I’m sorry, but all of a sudden I had this vision. I’m sitting on the porch with my granddaughter 30 years from now, and she’ll ask me ‘Grandpa, did you really do everything you could do to help our native people. Everything?!’”
The memories of that day, the powerfully emotional negotiations of the final wording of what became the First Nations rights section of the Charter came flooding back this week. I watched an elevator news ticker convey the astonishing news of the Supreme Court decision on Tsilhqot’in aboriginal title this week and gasped.
Their decision, which they made clear was grounded in the rights granted in Section 35 of the Charter, came almost precisely 33 years after those stormy meetings.
Now it is again the turn of Canada’s political leaders to step up and negotiate the path forward. The army of government lawyers and officials who have wasted literally billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money pretending to advance the issues of land claims, treaty implementation and resource revenue sharing have been shoved into the ditch by this decision. Progress will need political leadership.
The opportunity the court’s decision — astonishingly, unanimous — has created is for serious political negotiations to set the new rules, establish the frameworks for resource development that respect First Nations social and economic rights. Ottawa probably won’t convene the federal/provincial discussions — with First Nations and Canadian business leaders as participants — now required. So the provinces’ Council of the Federation could seize the baton. The summer meetings of the western premiers could lay the groundwork.
For the rest of this article, click here: http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2014/07/01/supreme_court_ruling_on_native_rights_offers_historic_chance_for_progress.html