Political Rhetoric Meets Legal Reality

The Aboriginal Canada and the Natural Resource Economy project seeks to attract the attention of policy makers, Aboriginal Canadians, community leaders, opinion leaders, and others to some of the policy challenges that must be overcome if Canadians, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal alike, are to realise the full value of the potential of the natural resource economy. [...] Amongst his specific commitments has been the im- plementation of all the recommendations of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which included a recommendation to implement the entirety of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indig- enous Peoples (UNDRIP) (Trudeau 2015b).1 The expectation of implementing UNDRIP also featured in the mandate letter written to the new government’s Minister [...] Considering the possibility of future change on this part of the law, the paper analyses the pos- sible effects of the courts attempting to add consent requirements onto the existing framework and suggests that moves in that direction may have very significant unintended consequences. [...] Much of the The fourth claim of the paper is that, notwithstanding all the attention to pertinent commitments on FPIC by the federal government, much of the pertinent ju- jurisdiction to risdiction to implement FPIC does not actually exist at the federal level in implement FPIC Canada. [...] According The duty to to Supreme Court of Canada cases, the specific obligation of the duty to consult is triggered consult in Canadian law stems from the general purposes of section 35 hundreds of in terms of reconciliation and also from the concept of the honour of the thousands of times Crown.