McNeil on Aboriginal Title in Canada

Kent McNeil, York University Osgoode Hall Law School, has posted Discarding Old Prejudices: Judicial Precedent and Aboriginal Title.  This is the Law Foundation of Saskatchewan Lecture, delivered at the University of Saskatchewan College of Law on October 28, 2019.  It is based on the author’s Flawed Precedent: The St. Catherine’s Case and Aboriginal Title (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019)

This talk on judicial precedent and Aboriginal title combines legal history and current law. The legal history is important because it informs the current law. It also reveals the racism in Canadian law that retarded the development of the concept of Aboriginal title until the 1970s.

My discussion of the early case law focuses on St. Catherine’s Milling and Lumber Co. v. The Queen, decided by the Privy Council in 1888. It was the leading judicial precedent on the source and content of Aboriginal title right up to the Supreme Court of Canada’s 1973 decision in Calder v. Attorney General of British Columbia. The question in St. Catherine’s was this: Did the Crown in right of Ontario or the Crown in right of Canada benefit from the surrender by the Saulteaux people of the Anishinaabe Nation of their Aboriginal title by Treaty 3 in 1873?

--Dan Ernst