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If that promise resonated in a particular way with any of our number, it resonated most profoundly with the Indigenous nations

I get asked from time to time, and with some umbrage: “Where was the Crown when those treaties were being abrogated or ignored?” I’ll tell you where it was: on the barricades! Listen to these words of Lord Dufferin, our first post-Confederation governor general, who travelled to British Columbia in the late 1870s and tried to get the legislature there to understand the folly of its ways:

“The Indian Question in British Columbia is not satisfactory,” Lord Dufferin lectured the provincial legislators. “The Government of British Columbia has neglected to recognize what is known as the Indian title. In Canada, this has always been done; no Government, whether provincial or central, has failed to acknowledge that the original title to the land existed in the Indian nations and communities that hunted or wandered over it. Before we touch a single acre, we make a proper and legal treaty with the chiefs representing the bands we are dealing with, and having agreed upon and paid the stipulated price, oftentimes arrived at after a great deal of haggling and difficulty, we enter into possession, but not until that moment do we consider that we are entitled to a single acre.”

Photo by Stefan Rousseau/PA via AP

That both Crown and First Nations have survived in the manner that they have is due to many factors, but part of the reason is a kind of unacknowledged mutual support arrangement.

This kinship, bound up in a concept of shared responsibility, is at the heart of a notion known simply as the Honour of the Crown. The notion comes down to us not just to cover the recognition of past treaties, past pledges, and past history; and not just to accept current realities, current responsibilities, and current obligations. It leads in powerful, logical, inexorable and in sacred direction to future possibilities and future opportunities.