‘Canada has a lot of unpaid bills’: $10B settlement reached in landmark First Nation treaty case – by Aya Dufour (CBC News Sudbury – June 17, 2023)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/

Community consultations, government approvals needed to finalize annuities deal

It took more than a decade of litigation, but 21 Anishinaabe communities along the north shore of Lake Huron in Ontario will finally access a fair share of the wealth generated on their lands over the past 173 years.

The Robinson-Huron Treaty signed in 1850 promised its Indigenous beneficiaries annual payments in exchange for the right to use their lands. A clause in the treaty explicitly tied the value of the annual payments to resource revenues.

Northeastern Ontario mining, lumber and fishing industries generated billions of dollars in profits over the past two centuries, but annual payments to First Nations were capped at $4 per person in 1874 and haven’t increased since.

In 2018, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruled that the Crown had a duty to increase annual payments to the beneficiaries of the Robinson-Huron Treaty. Canada, Ontario and these First Nations communities have been negotiating outside the courts since January.

For the rest of this article: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/indigenous-communities-first-nations-ontario-broken-promise-1.6880423