Ogoki/Marten Falls in northern Ontario
Reading Saturday's Globe and Mail, I thought of adding a new headline to my (imaginary) collection of dumb Globe and Mail headlines. This one was about the recent BC court decision on Cowichan indigenous title to a chunk of suburban Vancouver (maybe paywalled), and it read:
"Court ruling on Indigenous claim creates uncertainty around land ownership"
Should it not read "the ruling creates certainty around landownership." In the absence of treaties, indigenous title endures, and that should be certain.
Happily, I turned a few more (digital) pages, and found the Globe's own columnist Andrew Coyne, saying what their headline writer could not imagine. Coyne sees clearly the situation to which our governments and a depressingly large number of commentators, including academics who should know better, still seem oblivious. Title matters, and treaties (and their absence) matter. Deal with it, is Coyne's much needed message.
We are inundated with talk of -- and legislation for! -- blithely overriding indigenous consultation and consent in order to rush through energy corridors, resource developments, and other magical solutions to the American threat. A case in point: a recent Globe op-ed by Northern historian Ken Coates and Charles Cirtwell of the Northern Policy Institute.
Their sentiments are admirable:
If Prime Minister Mark Carney’s ambitious and still ill-defined plan for national economic renewal has a chance of success, the next decade will clearly be shaped by the development of the Provincial North. The people of the Provincial North should be clear winners in this endeavour, or Canada will be the loser.
Indeed. But their solution seems extraordinarily blinkered:
Many communities in the Provincial North have substandard internet, water services, fire protection and roads, to say nothing of the most serious shortcoming in the region: housing. While not a traditional megaproject, a collective commitment of this nature could well form part of a “grand bargain” that secures Indigenous support for resource and infrastructure plans.
Surely the time has long since passed for the idea that some new charitable contribution to northern living standards will suffice. The grand bargain already exists: a treaty. And it should not be left unmentioned.
What northern Ontario -- the main area of their "Provincial North" -- requires is treaty implementation. Treaty 9 (I mean the real treaty, negotiated on the land as the Royal Proclamation requires, not the fraudulent version in Ottawa's written version) established a sharing of the land between the Indigenous owners and the Crown, with mutual agreement on how it is used, and negotiated divisions of the benefits. Read John Long on Treaty 9 for the details.
The Cowichan ruling applies where there is no treaty. But where treaties already exist, as in the Provincial North, they has to be taken seriously: adhered to, not ignored. Maybe that will have to be the next big court ruling.
Ottawa's gift of a few new houses and better internet isn't going to cut it. That's a certainty.