The city of Ottawa has just approved C$778 million (HK$5.46 billion) in funding for a new light-rail, rapid-transit system. The debate leading to the plan's approval was bruising and divisive, but now it's all settled. Or is it?
Days after the final vote, city councillors were told that part of the rail line would be built on property that is subject to a land claim filed 23 years ago by an Algonquin Indian band. City staff tried to reassure elected officials that the claim would not delay construction, but that may be nothing more than uninformed optimism.
More than 300 years after British officials first created a legal basis for the seizure of lands from the aboriginal inhabitants of what is now Canada, the federal government and the courts are still adjudicating the terms of those treaties. A 1763 Royal Proclamation by Britain's King George III said that all the land in Canada belonged to the Crown. However, it also recognised that Canada's Aboriginal - or First Nations - peoples retained an interest in the land based on their use and occupation of it. And that means today's courts are acknowledging the rights of Aboriginals to block or delay development projects on those lands until their interest in them has been defined - and leased or purchased.
Since the 1970s, hundreds of First Nations bands across the country have filed claims that move through the legal process about as quickly as cold molasses. In many cases, the bands have been driven to the claims by the direst of necessity. The poverty, alcoholism and school drop-out rates on many of Canada's Indian reserves are shocking. The reserves tend to be isolated, poorly serviced and located on what was once thought to be marginal land.
Many of those reserves have since been discovered to have rich stands of timber or pools of gas or oil, or minerals, beneath them. And even if there are no valuable resources on the reserves proper, residents were given the right to hunt, fish and trap on lands around them. If your company intends to log or mine on government-owned lands close to a reserve, then sooner or later you're going to have to strike a deal with the nearest First Nation.
The city of Ottawa will most certainly have a legal battle on its hands. But that legal showdown is small potatoes compared to the one looming over the biggest corporate project in the country - the C$7 billion Mackenzie Valley gas pipeline that will run from the Arctic coast to Alberta - then on to energy-hungry markets in the United States. The pipeline was shelved 30 years ago because of outstanding land claims, many of which have since been settled.