Welcome back to This Week in Canada. It has been another wild week up north, where land acknowledgments may finally have enough teeth to become eviction notices, a censorship law (that censors me!) could be on the chopping block, anti-Palestinian racism joins the ever-expanding glossary of grievances, and the Maritime provinces have quarantined the woods. Let’s jump in!
It turns out that all those land acknowledgments weren’t just symbolic. They may have been advance notice.
When Canada adopted its constitution in 1982, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau slipped in a ticking time bomb: an explicit recognition of indigenous land rights without constitutional protection for property rights for other Canadians. That constitutional clause has fueled decades of lawsuits from First Nations—Canada’s indigenous people—asserting claims to huge portions of their ancestral territories.
Last Thursday, the British Columbia Supreme Court ruled that the Cowichan Nation holds “Aboriginal title” to about 1,846 acres of land on the south shore of Lulu Island in Richmond, and constitutionally protected rights to fish in the south arm of the Fraser River.
This 275,000-word judgment doesn’t just affect government-owned lands. It also includes private property now owned by third parties. So if you’re a Canadian who is a property owner in British Columbia and not indigenous, your claim on what you think you own has just been superseded by indigenous claims, called a “senior” claim in legalese. Down the road, your land or house could be expropriated by the federal government and turned over to an indigenous group that claims ownership.
That has already happened in Ontario, where three northern Ontario First Nations claimed in a lawsuit last month that a 14-acre public park in Kenora called Anicinabe Park is actually unceded territory and should be returned.
