Mr. Speaker, the Supreme Court of Canada, in refusing to rehear the Marshall case, has reminded us of the importance of actually reading court decisions before jumping to attack them.
The Marshall decision is deliberately limited to its own specific facts, narrowly defined: the closed season in the eel fishery in a part of New Brunswick. But the supreme court decision has also reminded us that aboriginal rights, customary and treaty-based, are legally subject to the constitution and the charter of rights and have always to be balanced against other competing individual or community rights.
Courts, parliamentarians, ministers and the parties themselves each have their own distinct and separate but fully complementary constitutional roles to play.
The lesson: think, instead of leaping to empty rhetoric.