Meaningful engagement with Indigenous peoples: a case study of Ontario’s Great Lakes Protection Act

ABSTRACT

While governments in Canada have a duty to act honourably in the development of legislative actions that may affect Aboriginal or treaty rights, Indigenous peoples’ input and knowledge have largely been excluded from the process. The Ontario provincial government recently sought to remedy this failure by engaging with Indigenous groups in the development and implementation of the Great Lakes Protection Act. Using qualitative data, this article explores the successes, challenges and lessons learned during Crown–Indigenous engagement in the development of this Act. The article concludes with recommendations on ways to strengthen processes of engagement between government and Indigenous groups.

KEYWORDS:

• Duty to act honourably
• meaningful engagement
• collaborative water governance
• Great Lakes Protection Act
• integrated watershed management

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Throughout this article we employ the term Indigenous when referring to communities or persons who are the original peoples of Canada. We employ the term First Nation(s) when referring to Indigenous nations who have a distinct relationship with the federal and provincial governments under the Indian Act. Though recent scholarship (Alfred 2011) and a resolution by the Anishinabek Nation: Union of Ontario Indians (2017) identify the term Aboriginal as assimilative, we use it only in reference to the specific legal terminology used by the Canadian state in the context of Aboriginal rights.

2. Section 35 of the Constitution Act (1982) recognizes the existing aboriginal and treaty rights of aboriginal peoples in Canada, including Indian, Inuit and Metis peoples.

3. Rather than strictly focusing on the legal requirements of the duty to consult, the term ‘engagement’ is used here to refer to all interactions between the government and Indigenous peoples. Engagement cannot be said to have a beginning or an end, and involves an ongoing process that, if carried out effectively, enables the duty to consult to take place. In practice, engagement processes and the legal requirements of the duty do not necessarily need to be distinguished from one another. As one respondent (no. 4, 2017) explained, ‘For me, there is no difference between engagement and consultation; engagement is just part of the continuum of that law.’

4. See Ronan (2015) for an evaluation of the GLPA and Krantzberg (2017) for an evaluation of the GLGC.

5. Ontario ministries have since adopted mandatory Indigenous cultural awareness and safety training through a programme called San’yas, which was developed in British Columbia and customized for Ontario.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada [grant 448172-2014] and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant 435-2018-1137].