Canada

Canada's Indigenous and Northern Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett says that her country will implement the UN Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Metro Toronto reports. Bennett is part of new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberal government.

The UN Declaration goes further than the constitutional protection requiring the Canadaian government to consult with indigenous peoples on issues that might affect their interests.

Lana Slezic has a visual history in The Walrus of the Canadian residential schools in which Indian children were taken away from their families to boarding schools in order to "civilize them." The United States has this same history of assimilation too (I wrote my senior thesis at Mount Holyoke College about this). Slezic's photographic essay looks at the decaying remains of these institutions, asking if their destruction through the decay of time and acts of vandalism is a good thing or a bad thing: "Forgetting helps some people heal. Remembering helps others learn."

The Canada Supreme Court has ruled that Ecuadoreans can sue Chevron and its Canadian subsidiary within that country to enforece a $9.5 billion judgment in Ecuador, The Globe and Mail's Sean Fine reports. Fine notes that the ruling weakens the corporate veil between a corporate parent and its subsidiary and "has major implications for Canadian multinational companies whose business activities raise environmental or human-rights concerns around the globe."

There have been a lot of headlines about a Canadian truth and reconciliation commission taking that country to task for how it has treated its indigenous peoples.

The Truth and Reconcilaition Commission has called for Canada to adopt the United Nations Declaration On the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, The Toronto Globe and Mail's Kim Mackrael reports. But critics are raising the concern that the declaration isn't compatible with Canadian law: "At issue is a legal requirement to consult and accommodate aboriginal people in circumstances in which their rights may be affected. Ottawa has argued that a shift to free, prior and informed consent – a concept envisioned in the UN declaration – could go further, possibly giving aboriginal people the power to veto a proposed project," Mackrael reports. But aboriginal groups point out that the rights in the document are relative, not absolute.

Even though Canada endorsed the non-binding declaration, it has not taken any steps to implement its protections for indigenous peoples.

The Canadian province Ontario has empowered patients and their caregivers to control the types of services they receive at home, The Canadian Press reports. The self-directed care program will start with pilot projects first with the goal "to give patients and their caregivers more flexibility and control over the care they receive by involving them more in the planning and coordination at the start." Additional funding will provide 80,000 additional nursing hours for patients with more complex needs so they can stay at home instead of being cared for at a hospital or nursing home.

There was an interesting bioethics ruling in Canada last month at the crossroads of traditional medicine and modern medicine. A young aboriginal girl has leukemia, and a Canadian judge ruled that her mother has a constitutional right to seek indigenous medicine, rather than chemotherapy, to treat her daughter, the Toronto Star's Jacques Gallant reports. The judge later clarified his ruling, writing that "'recognition and implementation of the right to use traditional medicines must remain consistent with the principle that the best interests of the child remain paramount.”'

The girl's treatment team includes a "doctor, a senior pediatric oncologist recommended by the government, and a Haudenosaunee chief who practises traditional medicine and was invited by the family," Gallant reports.

The Canada Supreme Court ruled for the first time in favor of issuing a declaration of aboriginal title, or that an aboriginal group owns their land, David C. Nahwegahbow writes for CBC. The decision was in favor of the Tsilhqot'in Nation, who reside in the British Columbia province and who say they were not consulted about forestry operations within thier lands. According to Nahwegahbow, the Supreme Court rebuked with its ruling the doctrine of terra nullius, a theory that "espouses that Indigenous peoples were so uncivilized that they could not be seen in law to be true legal occupants and owners of their lands."

James Anaya, U.N. special rapporteur on indigenous rights, said during a visit to Canada that "there's a crisis in Canada with regard to indigenous issues, notwithstanding some important developments within Canada over the last decades," the Associated Press reported.

The disparities include: one in five indigenous Canadians live in dilapidated and often overcrowded homes, Anaya said, and "funding for aboriginal housing is woefully inadequate;" and that the suicide rate among Inuit and First Nations youth who live on reservations is more than five times greater than that of other Canadians.