Law Commons^™

Bibliography On Indigenous Rights In Canada, 1995-2023, Leslie Haddock, Kent Mcneil

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No abstract provided.

Indigenous Peoples In Canada: A Bibliography Of Legal And Other Works To 1994, Kristen Clark, Leslie Haddock, Kent Mcneil

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No abstract provided.

Procedural Injustice: Indigenous Claims, Limitation Periods, And Laches, Kent Mcneil, Thomas Enns

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When Indigenous peoples go to court to seek justice for the historical wrongs they have endured, the Crown often tries to prevent their claims from even being heard by pleading statutes of limitations and laches. The application of these barriers raises serious constitution issues that have been taken account of by the Supreme Court only in the context of declarations of constitutional invalidity. Arguments based on the constitutional division of powers and section 35(1) of the Constitution Act, 1982 have not been addressed by the Court. As a result, limitations statutes that vary from province to province have been applied …

The Legal Relations Of ‘Private’ Forests: Making And Unmaking Private Forest Lands On Vancouver Island, Estair Van Wagner

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While the vast majority of forestlands in Canada are considered ‘Crown land’, there are key areas of private forestland. On private land the incidents of fee simple ownership mean the owner emerges as land use decision maker – the “agenda setter” for the land. Yet a richer set of legal relations exists in these forests.

Indigenous legal orders derived from an enduring relationship with the land and place also govern forestlands. Using the case of the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway lands in British Columbia, this article explores the intersection between historical and contemporary human-forest relations upheld by Anglo-Canadian law and …

Welcome Home: Aboriginal Rights Law After Desautel, Kent Mcneil, Kerry Wilkins

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In R v Desautel, decided April 23, 2021, a majority of the Supreme Court of Canada held, for the first time, that an Indigenous community located in the United States, whose members are neither citizens nor residents of Canada, can have an existing Aboriginal right, protected by section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, to hunt a specified area within Canada. This will be so, the Supreme Court majority held, where the community can show that it descends from (is a successor of) an Indigenous community that was present in what is now Canada at the time of …

Indigenous And Crown Sovereignty In Canada, Kent Mcneil

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Peter Russell, a prominent Canadian political scientist, tells of the time he met with Dene leaders on his first visit to the Northwest Territories in 1974. A Dene woman opened the discussion by asking: “Professor Russell, I have two questions for you: What is sovereignty? And how did the Queen get it over us?” Years later, he described his response: “For the first question, I had a nice, pat answer based on Bodin, Hobbes, and my understanding of European international law. But I stumbled over the second. The truth of the matter is that I didn’t have a clue how …

The Inherent Right Of Indigenous Governance, Kent Mcneil

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I would like to start by acknowledging and thanking the Algonquin Nation, on whose unceded territory we are meeting.

When the Dominion of Canada was created in 1867 by the UK Parliament, the BNA Act gave the Parliament of Canada exclusive jurisdiction over “Indians, and Lands reserved for the Indians”. Parliament used this authority to enact the Indian Act in 1876. That statute gave the Canadian government the power to impose the band council system on First Nations without their consent.

The governance authority of First Nation band councils is therefore delegated authority – it comes from the Indian Act …

Indigenous Sovereignty And The Legality Of Crown Sovereignty: An Unresolved Constitutional Conundrum, Kent Mcneil

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Let me start by acknowledging and thanking the Enoch Cree Nation, on whose territory we are meeting.

So here we are, 150 years after Confederation, and yet the legal basis for Crown sovereignty over Canada remains uncertain.

The standard explanation is that the Crown acquired sovereignty over French Canada by cession of Acadia (French possessions in what became the Maritime Provinces) by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, and by conquest of New France in 1759-60 and cession by the Treaty of Paris in 1763. However, this leaves unexplained how France got sovereignty over territories that were occupied and controlled …

Aboriginal Title And Indigenous Governance: Identifying The Holders Of Rights And Authority, Kent Mcneil

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Aboriginal rights, including Aboriginal title to land, are communal rights that are vested in Indigenous collectivities that are connected to the specific Indigenous groups that occupied and used land prior to European colonization of Canada. Identifying the present-day collectivities that hold these rights is therefore essential. This research paper examines the jurisprudence on this matter in relation to three categories of court decisions: Aboriginal title cases, Aboriginal rights cases apart from title, and duty to consult cases. Analysis of the case law reveals that identification of current rights holders is treated as a matter of fact that depends in part …

Developments On Aboriginal Title, Kent Mcneil

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I would like to thank the organizers of this conference, especially Arif Bulkan and Velma Newton, for inviting me to speak and welcoming me to Belize.

Tom Berger has made my task much easier by presenting the philosophical and legal underpinnings for Indigenous land rights, and providing an introduction to the development of the doctrine of Aboriginal title in Canada.

I am going to try to fill in some of the detail by drawing a composite picture of Indigenous rights in the four common law jurisdictions that I am familiar with, namely Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. …

Indigenous Law And Aboriginal Title, Kent Mcneil

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This paper discusses the relevance of Indigenous law to Aboriginal title in Canada, as revealed in three leading Supreme Court decisions: Delgamuukw v. British Columbia (1997), R. v. Marshall; R. v. Bernard (2005), and Tsilhqot’in Nation v. British Columbia (2014). It concludes that Indigenous law relates to Aboriginal title in two ways: it is part of the evidence that can be relied upon to establish the exclusive occupation necessary for title at the time of Crown assertion of sovereignty, and it continues thereafter to govern the communal land rights of the Aboriginal titleholders. Moreover, the content of Indigenous law is …

The Jurisdiction Of Inherent Right Aboriginal Governments, Kent Mcneil

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Since the recognition of Aboriginal and treaty rights in Canada by section 35(1) of the Constitution Act, 1982, the inherent right of the Aboriginal peoples to govern themselves has become a generally accepted aspect of Canadian constitutional law. But what is the scope of the governmental authority, or jurisdiction, that is exercisable by inherent right Aboriginal governments? And how does the jurisdiction of Aboriginal governments interact with the jurisdiction of other governments in Canada, especially the federal and provincial governments? This research paper will attempt to answer these questions in a general way, without attempting to determine or assess the …