 So, I just wanted to say that when I read the decision, I kind of, at first I was triggered because this was an exact retrofit of the McKeckern judgment in Delgamut, where McKeckern held aboriginal rights over a broad area of the Gicksand and Wittesawatton territory, and then said that aboriginal title had been extinguished, except over village sites. Now, McKeckern was 1991, and between 1991 and 2004, we gave up our time and our peace and our sleep for fighting the Delgamut case up to the Supreme Court of Canada, fighting the Haida case, establishing a different framework about reconciliation, where you have a jurisdictional and an economic component acknowledged in your title, where aboriginal title hadn't been extinguished in British Columbia, where crown sovereignty is limited by obligations that arise upon the assertion of sovereignty, where indigenous laws pre-existed and survived the assertion of sovereignty. We fought all these issues, and suddenly we're back to 1991 again. And so, what I'd like to do is go through the system of thought that is embodied in this judgment, because there's no possibility of breaking a system of thought unless you're conscious of it. So I'd like to turn to the logic and the trajectory of the judgment so you can see what it is we're dealing with. Well, as you know, many of you have heard me say it before. The court has said repeatedly that it must take into account the aboriginal perspective. The Supreme Court has said, only by fully recognizing the aboriginal legal entitlement can the aboriginal legal perspective be satisfied. This is an imperative which has been locked into court decisions now since Sparrow. Well, the court's brief reference in the Chakotin case to the aboriginal perspective on title is found in one paragraph, and this is what the court says. The connection of the Chakotin nation to its traditional territory has both spiritual and temporal aspects that are difficult to convey in the dry words of the judgment. And then the court became speechless in terms of the Chakotin's concept of lands. One sentence was all we had. Instead what the court did is it took its opportunity to express its own views about why reconciliation has not been achievable through negotiation. And it referred to the extreme positions which have been taken. And they said by government, for example, when they said in Delgamut that aboriginal title had not been extinguished in British Columbia. And then to the Delgamut, and then to the Gixana with Soaten, they attributed this extreme position that they had absolute ownership of their territory and a paramount right to govern it. And the court concluded that these extreme positions have failed to provide a genuine basis for negotiation. Now I rattled at that because the extreme position that the court attributed to the Gixana with Soaten was actually the position that the attorney general's office characterized their position throughout the course of the case. And actually it was Justice Groberman who wrote this decision for the court who was a lawyer in the attorney general's office throughout the Delgamut era. And so we see the position of the court actually reflecting the attorney general's position, which is a mischaracterization of the position of the Gixana with Soaten. And from an aboriginal perspective and keeping on this first point, I don't know where the idea comes from that indigenous people only regard on salt licks, rocks for fishing or narrow canyons or buffalo jumps for your existence. It just defies common sense. And I cannot believe that those 30 years we fought from Calder to Delgamut about whether title had been extinguished in British Columbia is about extinguishment over salt licks. And what jurisdictional and economic component is a salt lick? And so I wanted to just raise the question, how did cultural security replace the jurisdictional and economic component of title? So the first piece I wanted to say when we look at this is that the aboriginal perspective is ignored. And also I wanted to return to something which is that when you look at what the court relied on to get to where it did, it actually revived from the dead two legal positions which have already run through the courts and have already been rejected. The first legal position is that aboriginal title exists only where it can be proven. That's basically what the court said. If you can't prove it, you don't have it, the crown gets it. If you don't prove it, you'll lose it. That's certainly not what the royal proclamation said. Well I want to remind us back into 1980 when the Constitution was being patriated without any participation by Indigenous nations. And you'll remember the Constitutional Express was organized and it started marching across the country. It ended up in Ottawa. Trudeau announced that he was going to increase the Parliamentary Standing Committee, which had previously said they weren't going to listen to Indigenous representations. That Constitutional Express, they didn't go over to the Standing Committee. Instead they went to, first of all, Governor General Schreyer and delivered a bill of particulars and a petition seeking international supervised negotiations. Then they delivered that to the government of Canada. Then they traveled to New York and delivered it to the United Nations. Then they went across Europe and made the same explanation about the denial of basic human rights and the exclusion from Constitutional Reform throughout Europe. Then they landed in London where the potlatch, which was held there, celebrated the ties with the crown. Well while all of that was going on, Section 35 was taken out of the Constitutional Canada Bill draft, then reinserted. Now one of the drafts that was taken out, this is what it said. It said, the Aboriginal Treaty rights of Aboriginal people of Canada, as they have been or may be defined by the courts, are hereby recognized and affirmed and can only be modified by amendment. That is exactly the interpretation the BC Court of Appeal gave to Aboriginal title. Aboriginal title as they may be defined by the court. That wasn't what Section 35 ultimately said. That was the draft that was rejected. What Section 35 said is existing Aboriginal and Treaty rights are hereby recognized and affirmed. And if you'll recall, the premiers thought that the word existing meant extinguished. They thought it was an empty box. And so the very first case we took after Section 35 was included with sparrow where the court said that Section 35 meant the opposite, that existing meant unextinguished and that Section 35 held the promise of rights recognition and reconciliation. So then we turned our legal minds to how to deal with the fact that Aboriginal title has not been extinguished in British Columbia. And you know the story of Delgamook where we eventually found our way in the Supreme Court of Canada where the court held that Aboriginal title has not been extinguished. And so I just wanted to point out that the interpretation the court gave is exactly the interpretation that was rejected during the constitutional conferences and was rejected by the court in Delgamook. But here it is all over again. And the second position that has been revised from the judicial grave is that Aboriginal title exists only over small spots like village sites and enclosed fields. And we had this argument in Delgamook. The first time this argument appeared, the lands over which Aboriginal title existed was at the trial division in Delgamook where McKeckern Hell was asked to find that Aboriginal title was extinguished over everything but village sites and enclosed fields. And this the crown argued had been accomplished when Aboriginal people voluntarily left their territory and came on to Indian reserves. Well that argument didn't even make it past the trial division. McKeckern didn't agree with it. Well on appeal we see the argument all dressed up again. Only this time it's dressed up in the nature of Aboriginal title. And what the crown argued is that Aboriginal title is really just a bunch of practices where if they are intensely occupied if they are intensely practiced on a piece of land then you have Aboriginal title like village sites and enclosed fields. And the court rejected that and said that Aboriginal title has a jurisdictional and an economic component. Well you know the governments never liked what Delgamook had to say. They never implemented and they turned their minds to overturning it and they turned the table on it by migrating these arguments to an argument about the onus of proof. And this is what happened. They said that Aboriginal title is if a First Nation takes to court seeking a declaration of Aboriginal title they have the onus of proving title. So the crown says the only way that they could prove title is by Aboriginal title as they said is about village sites and enclosed fields. And if you don't prove it then the title becomes that of the crown. And they built this theory based on a reading of Bernard and Marshall. And this is the test that Mr. Justice Ficker called an impoverished view of Aboriginal title that cannot be allowed to pervade and inhibit genuine negotiation. And this is the test that was adopted by the court. And I want to point out that this isn't the test that the court in Delgamook said. The court in Delgamook said that in order to prove title it can be title can be proved through physical possession or laws. The new test adds the dimension of intensive use and fails to mention laws. And it's a discriminatory test because crown granted common law property rights don't inquire whether a rancher who holds large tracts of land in feast simple uses all of the land when some of the land is left to lie foul or how annual his habits are on the land. It's a test which really does not cut both ways. And so I just wanted to stop here by saying that these litigation, this is really a litigation position of the crown. This is what we come to. This case reflects a litigation position of the crown which has been argued for years, which has been rejected by the court, which has been dressed up into a new a new mask called the onus of proof. And this is finally for the first time it was accepted by the BC court of appeal. And I just before we get too far into the analysis further, I just wanted to point out that the ultimate destination of this case is tied up with the Jules and Wilson case, which you'll recall we've talked about many times over the years after almost 11 years before the court were still standing. And that case raises the issue about the province's obligation to prove its onus that it has crown title in the authority. It asserts. And so there's two cases which are now going to compete for the legal attention as to whether or not this onus of proof argument that was accepted in the Chocotin case is going to ultimately unwind to become the law of this country. At the moment it's a legal position of the crown which has been accepted by the BC court of appeal. And I just wanted to, before we get further into understanding the thought pattern of the case in its entirety, I just wanted to mention that the case is actually, as you read it, it builds itself on racial stereotyping. And racial stereotyping is one of the ways in which human suffering on a global scale has been inflicted for a long time.