Monthly Archives: June 2014

Ecocide, Ecocide ALert, Fascism/Corporatism, Politics

Peru now has a ‘licence to kill’ environmental protesters

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Peruvian security forces arrest a protester in June 2009 during conflict that led to more than 30 people dying and over 200 injured.
Peruvian security forces arrest a protester in June 2009 during conflict that led to more than 30 people dying and over 200 injured. Photograph: AP

Law exempts soldiers and police from criminal responsibility if they cause injuries or deaths

By David Hill, reposted from The Guardian, June 29, 2014

Some of the recent media coverage about the fact that more than 50 people in Peru – the vast majority of them indigenous – are on trial following protests and fatal conflict in the Amazon over five years ago missed a crucial point. Yes, the hearings are finally going ahead and the charges are widely held to be trumped-up, but what about the government functionaries who apparently gave the riot police the order to attack the protestors, the police themselves, and – following Wikileaks’ revelations of cables in which the US ambassador in Lima criticized the Peruvian government’s “reluctance to use force” and wrote there could be “implications for the recently implemented Peru-US FTA” if the protests continued – the role of the US government?

The conflict broke out in northern Peru after mainly indigenous Awajúns and Wampis had been peacefully protesting a series of new laws which were supposedly emitted to comply with a trade agreement between Peru and the US and which made it easier, among other things, for extractive industries to exploit natural resources in their territories. Following a blockade of a highway near a town called Bagua – and an agreement that the protestors would break up and go home, reached the day before – early on 5 June the police moved to clear it and started shooting. In the ensuing conflict, 10 police officers, five indigenous people and five non-indigenous civilians were killed, more than 200 injured – at least 80 of whom were shot – and, elsewhere in the Bagua region, a further 11 police officers were killed after being taken hostage.

“So far only protesters have been brought to trial,” said Amnesty International in a statement marking five years since the conflict and pointing out that human rights lawyers have said there is no serious evidence linking the accused to the crimes they are being prosecuted for – which include homicide and rebellion. “[S]o far little progress has been made to determine the responsibility of the security forces. Likewise, no progress has been made to investigate the political authorities who gave the orders to launch the police operation.”

Does this desperate failure of justice not effectively constitute a “licence to kill” for the police? Maybe, maybe not, but whatever the answer Peru has now formalised that licence by emitting a law that, as the Dublin-based NGO Front Line Defenders (FLD) puts it, grants:

. . . members of the armed forces and the national police exemption from criminal responsibility if they cause injury or death, including through the use of guns or other weapons, while on duty. Human rights groups, both nationally and internationally, the Human Rights Ombudsman (Defensoria del Pueblo) as well as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights all expressed deep concern about the law. In the words of the [Lima-based] Instituto Libertad y Democracia [IDL], the law equates, in practice, to a “licence to kill.”

That law, no. 30151, was promulgated in January this year and is, according to the IDL’s Juan José Quispe, a modification of existing legislation passed by the previous government. The modification consists of replacing three words – “en forma reglamentaria” – with another five – “u otro medio de defensa” – which Quispe says means that any soldier or police officer can now kill or injure a civilian without needing to use his or her weapon “according to regulations”, or by using something other than his or her weapon.

“We continue considering this law as one that grants the armed forces as well as the national police a licence to kill,” Quispe told the Guardian. “It permits a high degree of impunity. During the repression of social protests, police officers and soldiers who cause injuries or deaths will now be exempt from criminal responsibility.”

Quispe says that the exemption will also apply to police or soldiers who, in the fight against narco-terrorism in particular, accidentally kill civilians.

“It’s a dangerous law and constitutes a threat to everyone,” he says. “It permits the use of weapons by contravening existing law and international parameters such as the United Nations’ Principles. It gives soldiers and police officers acarte blanche to commit crimes with impunity.”

The controversial law was highlighted by the FLD in a report published this month titled “Environmental Rights Defenders at Risk in Peru.” What that report makes clear is that if you’re Peruvian and you publicly express concern about the environmental and social impacts of mining operations you can expect the following: death threats, rape threats, physical and electronic surveillance, smears and stigmatization by national mainstream media, police acting as “private security” for mining companies, confiscation or theft of equipment, “excessive use of force by police” during protests, arrest, or detention, and prosecution on charges of “rebellion, terrorism, violence, usurpation, trespassing, disobedience or resistance to an official order, obstructing public officers, abduction, outrage to national symbols, criminal damage, causing injury, coercion, disturbance or other public order offences.”

While the FLD’s report acknowledges that the “vast majority” of court proceedings have ended in acquittals or with the charges dropped, it argues that the “extraordinary use” of lawsuits constitutes an “abusive use of the judicial system” and impedes “the work of the [accused], affecting their reputation and furthering the view – often upheld by national media – that they are violent extremists. This is especially the case when accusations of terrorism, rebellion or violence are levied.” It states that almost 400 people currently face court proceedings, and cites one man as an example, Milton Sanchez Cubas, who has faced roughly 50 but never been convicted.

The FLD’s report ends with a serious of recommendations to Peru’s government, including that the “licence to kill” law is repealed.

“All documented instances of intimidation, death threats, physical attacks, surveillance, stigmatisation, smear campaigns, and judicial harassment appear to be directly related to legitimate and peaceful work,” it states, “in particular in supporting. . . local communities opposed to mining projects and their impact on their environment, territory and livelihood.” SOURCE

 

Activism, Preventing Ecocide

Here’s to a radical Canada Day!

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Photo: David Suzuki Foundation.

by David Suzuki, reposted from Rabble.ca, June 24, 2014

Oh, Canada, what will become of you?

Although I’m proudly Canadian, my early memories are mixed. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, our government unfairly deprived my family of citizenship rights and exiled us to the B.C. Interior, even though we were born and raised here. But my love of nature flourished during that time in the spectacular Slocan Valley.

As a young adult, I moved to the U.S. for educational opportunities not available in Canada. Disturbed by overt racism in the American South, I eventually returned to my increasingly tolerant homeland. I preferred Canada, which to me meant Tommy Douglas and Medicare, Quebec, the National Film Board and CBC. I’ve never regretted my choice.

Canadians have strived to move beyond inequality and intolerance to create an inclusive and caring society, where education, public health, social programs and enlightened laws provide numerous opportunities. We’re not there yet, but we’ve come a long way in our relatively short history as a nation.

We also understand our place in nature. Surrounded by the world’s longest and most diverse coastline, our mountains, forests, prairies, rivers, lakes, valleys and skies define us and instill wonder and pride. Canada is nature. And nature is life. We know this.

Lately, the tide has been turning. Instead of protecting the increasingly precious and threatened natural systems that keep us alive and healthy, our leaders are rushing to scar the landscape with mines, roads and pipelines to sell our resources as quickly as possible to global markets. From tar sands expansion to fracking, federal and provincial governments are blindly proceeding with little thought about long-term consequences.

In 2007, our prime minister called climate change “perhaps the greatest threat to the future of humanity.” Now he says, “No matter what they say, no country is going to take actions that are going to deliberately destroy jobs and growth in their country.” Yet, many actions our industries and governments are taking will hurt the ability to create jobs and keep the economy prosperous. Clean energy and educated citizens are healthier investments than an increasingly risky fossil fuel industry — and we can’t hope for abundant jobs and a thriving economy on a planet suffering the ever-worsening consequences of global warming.

Canada was once seen as a country where respect for each other and our land, air, water and biodiversity were valued. Now, some government leaders and their industry and media supporters threaten those who dare question the mad scramble for short-sighted, short-term profits at the expense of the environment, our health and the world’s climate systems, and label us “radicals.”

If it’s radical to insist on maintaining and strengthening values that have long defined us as a nation, then we’ll wear the label proudly. We are radically Canadian! That means building on the progress we’ve made over the years to create a society based on compassion, equity and respect for the people and places we know and love.

Canada has long been known as a country that gets it right, that treats its citizens well and cares for the land that gives us so much, and plays a constructive role on the world stage. But now we’re lagging in many areas, our hard-earned reputation suffering. We’re no longer a leader in protecting the conditions that make Canada one of the best places on Earth for citizens and visitors alike.

Enshrining the right to a healthy environment in the Constitution’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms would help get Canada back on track. More than 110 countries have constitutional environmental rights. But not Canada. It’s not just about protecting birds, bees and trees; it’s about social justice and ensuring all citizens have the right to the conditions necessary for healthy, fruitful lives.

What kind of Canada do you want? Do you treasure our spectacular natural landscapes, clean water and air and abundant natural resources? Do you value our commitment to fairness, enlightened social programs, education and public health? Do you believe we should do all we can to protect the things that make this country great?

Now is a good time to reflect on these questions, on where we are as a nation and where we want to be. Happy Canada Day!

Written with Contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Editor Ian Hanington.

Learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org.

Preventing Ecocide, Remediation and Restitution, solutions

NASA prepares to launch carbon tracking satellite

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NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2)
NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2)

by Tim Radford, Climate News Network, reposted from RTCC, June 30, 2014

The ability of scientists to make accurate predictions about future effects of CO2 will be boosted by vital data from a US satellite being launched to take a detailed inventory of the planet’s sinks and sources of carbon.

The US space agency NASA is about to send up a satellite that will provide vital data for predicting future effects of CO2by taking the measure of the planetary carbon budget.

OCO-2, more formally known as Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2, is planned for launch on July 1 and will circle the globe, taking an inventory of those places on the planet that absorb carbon from the atmosphere (the sinks) and those places that release it into the atmosphere (the sources).

Although the satellite’s acronymic name pleasingly evokes CO2, the carbon dioxide greenhouse gas that is now at higher levels in the atmosphere than at any time in the last 800,000 years, this is pure accident.

The first attempt to launch an orbiting carbon observatory came to grief when the satellite failed to separate from the launch rocket. OCO-2 is the second attempt.

Future build-up

“Knowing what parts of Earth are helping to remove carbon from our atmosphere will help us understand whether they can keep on doing so in future,” said the project scientist Michael Gunson, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Quantifying these sinks now will help us predict how fast CO2 will build up in the future.”

Carbon dioxide exists in the atmosphere only in trace amounts: 400 parts per million. But humans are adding 40 billion tons of the gas a year by burning fossil fuel, destroying forests and quarrying lime for cement.

Less than half of this total stays there: the rest is taken up by forests on land and by algae in the oceans. But quite how much, for how long, and how predictably, remains a puzzle.

Climate scientists need to know more about sinks and sources to make more accurate predictions. And governments, planners and foresters need to know more about the ways the forest world absorbs and emits carbon dioxide.

The new satellite will use onboard spectrometers to take hundreds of thousands of measurements every day to answer these complex questions of supply and demand. Researchers are also likely to match the data with other studies of the planet’s changing forests.

Scientists at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich − where records show that average temperatures have risen by 1.5C in the last century − have been observing at ground level, to measure changes in the growing season.

There are around 16,000 species in the Munich Botanical Garden, and researchers have measured changes in leaf-out times for 500 species to establish why the characteristic forests of the region are likely to change with warming temperatures.

Inexorable change

The answer is that some species burst into leaf when daylight reaches a certain number of hours, while some respond to temperature.

This will put central European species − such as beech, which buds when there are 13 hours of daylight, whether the spring has arrived early or not − at a disadvantage. Southern species, which respond instead to rising temperatures, will gain a growing advantage.

Meanwhile, in the US, foresters have begun to resign themselves to inexorable change in the iconic forests of Minnesota.

A report by the US Forest Service warns that, in the next 100 years, the evergreen white spruce and balsam fir and cool-climate deciduous trees, such as tamarack and quaking aspen, could give way to black cherry, eastern white pine, sugar maple and white oak.

As temperatures rise, researchers expect to see longer growing seasons, increases in heavy precipitation, more flooding and erosion, more drought stress, increasing risks of forest fire, and many more invasive pest species.

“Our assessment gives forest managers in Minnesota the best possible science on the effects of climate change so they can make climate- informed decisions about management today,” said Stephen Handler, the report’s lead author.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network

 

Politics, Preventing Ecocide, solutions

While Canada Sleeps, Denmark to Launch $1 Billion Green Energy Fund

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A windmill rises over farmland on the Danish island of Samso in this May 20, 2008 file photo. Photo: Bob Strong

Bid to Attract Private Capital to Renewable Energy Projects and Generate New Jobs

by Kirsten Korosec, reposted from EnergyManagerToday, June 27, 2014

Denmark will form a nearly $1 billion green fund in an effort to reduce energy use, fund renewable energy projects and create jobs.

The country’s finance minister Bjarne Corydon announced the government’s plans to create theDenmark Green Investment Fund this week, reported the Wall Street Journal. The fund will initially provide 2 billion kroner ($365 million) in government guarantees designed to attract investments from pension funds and other private institutions. Under the deal, another 3 billion kroner in government guarantees can be added in a later phase.

The UK has created a similar green investment fund , reported the Wall Street Journal. Several U.S. states such as New York also have formed green banks to help finance energy projects. In February, the New York Green Bank began seeking proposals from private sector stakeholders that facilitate the financing of creditworthy clean-energy projects in New York State.

The NY Green Bank was formed to facilitate private market financing of renewable energy and energy efficiency projects that have difficulty accessing financing due to market barriers. Eligible proposers include energy service companies, developers, equipment manufacturers or others that provide equipment, materials and/or services related to renewable energy and energy efficiency projects along with financial institutions or other third-party capital providers that are financing, or intending to finance, such projects.

Activism, Preventing Ecocide, solutions

New Study Adds Up the Benefits of Climate-Smart Development in Lives, Jobs, and GDP

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Bus rapid transit systems that shift commuters to faster public systems take cars off the road, create jobs, and reduce pollution that damages health and contributes to climate change. Sam Zimmerman/World Bank

reposted from The World Bank, June 23, 2014

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • With careful design, the same development projects that improve communities, save lives, and increase GDP can also fight climate change.
  • A new study examines the multiple benefits for a series of policy scenarios addressing transportation and energy efficiency in buildings and industry in five countries and the European Union.
  • It provides concrete data to help policymakers understand the broader potential of climate-smart development investments.

Modernizing landfills and cleaning up open dumps have obvious benefits for surrounding communities, but the value reaches deeper into the national budget that may be evident at first glance.

For a country like Brazil, where waste-to-energy technology is being piloted today, integrated solid waste management practices including building sanitary landfills that capture greenhouse gas emissions to generate electricity can improve human health, add jobs, increase the energy supply, reduce the impact on climate change, and boost national GDP.

A new study looks at a series of climate-smart development project scenarios, including landfills in Brazil, and for the first time on a large scale adds up how government actions can boost economic performance and benefit lives, jobs, crops, energy, and GDP – as well as emissions reductions to combat climate change.

It provides concrete data to help policymakers understand the broader potential of climate-smart development investments.

“Climate change poses a severe risk to global economic stability, but it doesn’t have to be like this,” said World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim. “At the World Bank Group, we believe it’s possible to reduce emissions and deliver jobs and economic opportunity, while also cutting health care and energy costs. This report provides powerful evidence in support of that view.”

The report, Climate-Smart Development: Adding Up the Benefits of Actions that Help Build Prosperity, End Poverty and Combat Climate Change, focuses on five large countries – Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and the United States – plus the European Union. It examines the benefits of all six implementing three sets of policies on clean transportation, energy efficiency in industry, and energy efficiency in buildings.

In the transportation policy scenario, for example, if the five countries and the EU shifted more travel to public transit, moved more fright traffic off of roads to rails and sea, and improved fuel efficiency, they could save about 20,000 lives a year, avert hundreds of millions of dollars in crop losses, save nearly $300 billion in energy, and reduce climate changing emissions by more than four gigatons.

It also looks at the potential impact of four country-specific projects, including landfills in Brazil, if they were scaled to the national level.

Short-Lived Climate Pollutants

Some of the benefit comes from reducing emissions of what are known as short-lived climate pollutants, or SLCPs.

Black carbon from diesel vehicles and cooking fires, methane from mining operations and landfills, ozone formed when sunlight interacts with emissions from power plants and vehicles, and some hydrofluorocarbons are all SLCPs. They can damage crops and cause illnesses that kill millions. Reducing these emissions could avoid an estimated 2.4 million premature deaths and about 32 million tons of crop losses a year.

Unlike CO2, SLCPs do not linger in the atmosphere for centuries but are removed in weeks or years. Stopping these air pollution emissions from entering the atmosphere would by itself help reduce warming and provide time to develop and deploy effective CO2 interventions.

Activism, Cultural Ecocide, Ecocide ALert, Fascism/Corporatism, Politics, Preventing Ecocide, Video

‘We can repel this snake’ – the visionary battle over Canada’s eastern tar sands pipelines

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A video of a 700km protest march across Quebec shows the economic and environmental case against pipelines carrying Alberta’s tar sands

By Martin Lukas, reposted from The Guardian, June 11, 2014


The Peoples March for Mother Earth is crossing Quebec to protest TransCanada and Enbridge’s tar sands pipeline projects and push for a transition to a new economic model. Photo: Marco Simonsen-Sereda

A group of marchers walking more than 700 kilometres across Quebec to protest pipelines that would carry Alberta’s tar sands through the province are nearing their final destination.

As pipelines in British Columbia and the United States have been delayed by opposition, oil companies have increasingly turned their hopes to two eastward-looking pipeline projects – TransCanada’s Energy East and Enbridge’s Line 9 – that would pass oil through Quebec before exporting it abroad.

A new video vividly shows the concerns of farmers, land-owners, indigenous peoples and citizens the walkers have encountered along their route, the makings of a loose coalition mounting a growing protest.

People like Claudie Gagné, who for 15 years has operated a business in the province’s east, harvesting plants from along the St. Lawrence river – Quebec’s most important watershed – to enrich the dishes of restaurants in the region.

“I work with the river, I harvest plants from the shore,” Gagné says. “I create jobs with this enterprise, employing people in the region. So I’m scared that my livelihood is in danger. And for what? For jobs that will only last two years, and which will create nothing in the coming thirty years, while putting in peril the nature that I work with.”

Oil company promises that the pipeline projects will bring thousands of jobs and a boost to the Quebec economy, a new report indicates, are grossly overstated. And where the industry may create a dozen jobs here, a dozen there, they may end up jeopardizing thousands with a spill.

Gagné’s story contrasts with Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s claim, repeated this week, that it would be a “job-killer” to address climate change by reigning in oil companies. “No country is going to take actions that are going to deliberately destroy jobs and growth,” he said.

Presenting climate action as an irresponsible scheme to block badly-needed jobs in a time of economic crisis has proved to be a reliable script. This story has pitted the needs of the economy against the environment, of workers against ecologists, of communities against the planet.

But the truth is we can have both a strong, vibrant economy and a healthy, clean environment – though not by building pipelines. The faces encountered along the march – Gagné and her regenerative, river-based enterprise, the young people returning to the land to farm organically, a mechanic casting about for a new way of life, indigenous peoples seeking to apply their ancestral wisdom – all gesture toward a new economic paradigm that is tune with the environment.

The new paradigm would involve a transition to local, living economies, decentralized and with democratic control over resources, which could provide hundreds of thousands of good-paying, dignified and ecologically-viable jobs that transform our relationship to the environment and each other.

This vision of the walkers is backed up by evidence: report after report showing that investment in green industry creates far more jobs than investment in pipelines. One study demonstrates that spending $5 billion not on the oil and gas industry but on renewable power, housing retrofits, clean transport and recycling would create anywhere from 3 to 34 times as many direct jobs.

As the marchers have passed through Quebec, they have been joined by indigenous walkers, been welcomed in indigenous communities, and been inspired by an indigenous prophecy that a “black snake” of pipelines, like highways and railways before it, must be defended against.

“I feel like we can repel this snake that is coming to break the land, that is coming to pollute the air and contaminate our water,” Innu poet and walker Natasha Kanapé Fontaine says. “But I don’t know how we are going to save this land, if we continue to maintain our differences and conflicts and do not unite.”

In this province, that will require a reckoning with a form of oppression older even than the domination of Quebecers by english Canada: the domination of indigenous peoples by french Quebec. The dawning recognition of the importance of indigenous perspectives and rights – a powerful catalyst for a new economy – is a welcome change.

The pipeline snake, as a social movement from coast to coast has encircled it, has found itself increasingly caught in its pit. “Right now our oil is effectively landlocked,” Canada’s Finance Minister Joe Oliver complained on Monday, acknowledging the power of the growing climate justice movement. “Canadians need to understand the consequences of not moving our resources to tidewater.”

Canadians increasingly do, in fact, though not in the way the Minister would hope: they understand that the effort to keep dirty oil in the ground is helping unleash the imagination for a different kind of economy, one that works for people and the earth itself. SOURCE

@Martin_Lukacs

Activism, Cultural Ecocide, Ecocide ALert, Fascism/Corporatism, Politics, Uncategorized

Supreme Court had ‘no other choice’ in landmark ruling: lawyer

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Tsilhqot’in Nation case first time that the Supreme Court issued a declaration of Aboriginal title

The Supreme Court of Canada decision resolves important legal questions, such as how to determine aboriginal title and whether provincial laws apply to those lands.
The Supreme Court of Canada decision resolves important legal questions, such as how to determine aboriginal title and whether provincial laws apply to those lands. (CBC)

The Tsilhqot’in Nation case is a landmark decision because it is the first time in history that the Supreme Court ever issued a declaration of Aboriginal title – essentially a declaration that the Tsilhqot’in owned the land.

But reading the case, it is clear the Court had no other legitimate choice.

The BC government did not properly consult and accommodate the Tsilhqot’in people with regard to forestry operations within their lands. The BC Supreme Court issued a non-binding ruling wherein Justice Vickers said that the Tsilhqot’in probably had Aboriginal title and that the Crown ought to negotiate a fair and honourable settlement.

SCOC
The Tsilhqot’in Nation case is a landmark decision, the first time that the Supreme Court ever issued a declaration of Aboriginal title – essentially a declaration that the Tsilhqot’in owned the land.

What did the federal and BC governments do? Ignoring previous directions from the Supreme Court to seek reconciliation, they decided to appeal the ruling to the BC Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada.

The Crowns lost; common sense, the rule of law and constitutionalism prevailed.

Tsilhqot’in case proves Aboriginal title

The Crown governments argued that Aboriginal claimants had to establish intensive physical use of specific tracts of land to prove Aboriginal title – what has come to be known as the “postage stamp” theory of Aboriginal title. As the ethno-centric argument goes, the Tsilhqot’in and Aboriginal peoples generally were nomadic or semi-nomadic and unlike sedentary agricultural people, could never establish Aboriginal title to their traditional territories.

    • The Calder decision (1973) recognized the possibility that Aboriginal title may exist in Canada.
    • The Guerin decision (1984) where it held that Aboriginal title was an independent legal interest that could only be ceded to the Crown, which as a result made Aboriginal peoples vulnerable to the Crown and imposed a corresponding fiduciary duty on the Crown to act in the best interest of Aboriginal title-holders.
    • The Sparrow decision (1990) recognized and affirmed Aboriginal and treaty rights as “existing rights” within section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982.
    • The Delgamuukw case (1997) which said that Aboriginal title was on par with non-Aboriginal land ownership, in that it gave a right to exclusive occupancy and the right to enjoy the economic benefits of the land. Delgamuukw also set-out the test for proving Aboriginal title.
    • The Haida case (2004) where the Supreme Court said that Aboriginal peoples had to be consulted and accommodated before the Crown could take decisions that impacted adversely on their Aboriginal rights.

The IBA argued that Aboriginal claimants can also lead evidence of legal occupancy, i.e., Indigenous laws such as laws on tenure and trespass, to establish proof of Aboriginal title. There was ample evidence produced at trial to show that Tsilhqot’in people had such laws. The Supreme Court held that the Aboriginal perspective, including Tsilhqot’in laws are to be given equal weight in determining Aboriginal claims. This applies equally to treaty claims.

Tsilhqot’in proven to be owners of land

Further, one of the most interesting things about the Tsilhqot’in case is with regard to the doctrine of terra nullius, a Latin term which means empty land. That theory espouses that Indigenous peoples were so uncivilized that they could not be seen in law to be true legal occupants and owners of their lands.

It was the legal basis upon which Indigenous peoples were dispossessed of their lands throughout the colonial period in many parts of the world. The Crown postage stamp theory of Aboriginal title is reminiscent of the doctrine of terra nullius. The Supreme Court has now stated unequivocally in the Tsilhqot’in case that the doctrine of terra nullius is not part of the law in Canada.

‘It is quite likely that federal and provincial governments will again ignore the advice of the Court on reconciliation. This will mean more conflict in the future.’- David C. Nahwegahbow, lawyer

 

There is another important point in the case and that is the issue of consent.

The Supreme Court wrote that whether before or after a declaration of Aboriginal title, governments and individuals can avoid an infringement of the duty to consult by obtaining the consent of the Aboriginal group affected.

This effectively raises the significance of the First Nation communities in decision-making processes regarding resource management decisions affecting their land and rights. This lends credence to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which calls for the free prior and informed consent before development on Indigenous lands.

More conflict in future likely

What are the implications of the Tsilhqot’in Nation case for Canada? Will Crown conduct change? It is hard to say. Unfortunately, judging from their past conduct, it is quite likely that federal and provincial governments will again ignore the advice of the Court on reconciliation. This will mean more conflict in the future.

However, I am hopeful that the Crown will learn from this case: that they will sit down with Indigenous peoples, modify federal and provincial laws and policies to positively embrace what section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 provides, and what the Supreme Court has been saying all along — Aboriginal and treaty rights are hereby “recognized and affirmed”, and not denied, infringed and extinguished.