Turtle Talk

In R. v. Cardinal, [2011] A.J. No. 203, members of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation were convicted of selling fish on their reserve without a commercial license.  Their convictions were upheld by the Alberta Court of Appeal.

Here’s the decision.  An excerpt is below.

HELD: Application dismissed. There was no question that Alberta had jurisdiction to regulate the sale of fish in the province. The laws establishing this jurisdiction were extended to all Indians including those on reserves by section 12 of the Natural Resources Transfer Agreement. The same section extinguished any right to hunt commercially. The doctrine of interjurisdictional immunity had no application.

Both the trial judge and the appeal judge concluded that decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada and of this Court have definitively determined that the Province of Alberta has jurisdiction to regulate the sale of fish by Indians on reserves in the province. The applicants argue that these conclusions evince errors in law. They say the seminal case in this area, Cardinal v. Alberta (Attorney General) no longer applies because of s. 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982; Alberta has no jurisdiction over fishing and, in any event, no jurisdiction over fishing on an Indian reserve because of s. 10 of the Alberta Natural Resources Transfer Agreement and the decision in R. v. Blais, 2003 SCC 44, [2003] 2 S.C.R. 236. Blais only modified the treaty right to hunt commercially, not to fish commercially; and Alberta lacks the necessary jurisdiction as a result of the application of the doctrine of interjurisdictional immunity. All of the issues raised in this application have been conclusively determined against the applicants or are patently unarguable.