Canadian Lawyer

Thomas Fricke V ancouver lawyer Thomas Isaac remembers a classroom of empty chairs when he took an aboriginal law course in the early 1980s at St. Thomas University, a small liberal arts school in New Brunswick. ���I think I was one of a handful of people in the class,��� recounts Isaac, now a leading Canadian expert in the field. ���I don���t recall there being more than three or four or five people.��� Aboriginal law was barely on the legal map in Canada at the time, he explains, despite a brand new recognition of aboriginal and treaty rights in s. 35 of the Constitution Act of 1982, affirming unspecified protections for Indians, Inuit, and M��tis. ���It still wasn���t a live issue at all,��� says Issac, an author of 10 books on aboriginal law and leader of the aboriginal law group at McCarthy T��trault LLP. ���Academically, there was interest, but it was not affecting anybody on the ground, period.��� Popular thinking at the time, says Isaac, was constitutional protection of aboriginal rights would never amount to anything because ���it was sold as an empty box��� to government leaders in order to make it palatable. ���It was tough to find lawyers who were trained in this stuff. There were very few non-advocates ��� people not necessarily advocating for rights but just trying to understand them.��� Keith Bergner, another Vancouver lawyer who focuses on aboriginal law, tells a similar story. As a law student at McGill University in Montreal in the early 1990s, he was among only a few interested law students who showed up for ���poorly attended elective courses��� on aboriginal law. While aboriginal issues had been steadily gaining national attention ��� sparked by such events as the 1990 Oka crisis in Quebec and the failed Meech Lake accord that same year ��� the legal landscape was still relatively barren and there were few lawyers in the country who practised in the area. Twenty years later, aboriginal law is surging. Most major law firms now have aboriginal law groups and some hire aboriginal consultants. The Federation of Law Societies recommended last year that all new lawyers called to the bar have some knowledge of aboriginal rights. Law schools are thus taking steps to enhance their aboriginal law offerings and UBC last fall introduced a mandatory course for first-year students. There are now thousands of lawyers nationwide who practise aboriginal law either exclusively or part time, whether it is representing First Nations, governments, or private companies, as they navigate an area that has become increasingly complex and litigious. ���Canadian aboriginal law is an area that has grown exponentially,��� asserts Aim��e Craft, an indigenous lawyer and head of the Canadian Bar Association���s aboriginal law section. Craft, a descendant of Manitoba M��tis Louis Riel who practises at the Public Interest Law Centre in Winnipeg, notes aboriginal law has come a long way in recent years: until the early 1950s, the Indian Act banned First Nations from hiring lawyers to pursue land claims. ���I would say it���s been trending upwards for the last 10 or 15 years,��� concurs Bergner, a partner with Lawson Lundell LLP. ���But it has been noticed more lately. There have been some major projects, particularly in Western Canada, that have brought resource development to the fore, and when resource www.CANADIAN L a w ye r m a g . c o m April 2013 23

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