Thank you very much.
It's a really important question, and it's being played out in courts all across the country. As a lot of you know, there is a direction we're going in to recognize indigenous legal orders.
When I teach about this at law school or different venues, I always talk about how we're mistaught as lawyers. I know that will come as a surprise to most of you, but we're taught a lot of things that I think are wrong now. One of them that I remember from law school was that all decision-making authority and all law-making authority has to be connected somewhere to the Canadian Constitution. It has to be in either section 91 or section 92, or in either the provincial or the federal law-making authorities.
That's wrong. That's wrong in Canadian law. It's really hard speaking to government representatives who don't recognize that.
I have a file on fisheries in Atlantic Canada. I'm trying to convince federal government representatives that the Mi'kmaq have their own law-making authority, and you get a conversation of, “Wait a minute. We have to delegate them some law-making authority first.” That's a fundamental misunderstanding of the law, so I think where we need to get to is government officials recognizing it and courts recognizing it.
Yes, you can rely on these legal traditions and principles. It's starting, but it's very slow and it needs to move more quickly.