Powley Case
Voyageur Articles
February, 2001
by Tom Spaulding
“This past January 10th, 11th and 12th saw the Ontario
Government, for the third time, take on Steve Powley and his
son Roddy in a court of law....This time the case was heard
in Toronto in the Ontario Court of Appeals. After this there
is only one more court to which the Ontario Government can
go and that is the Supreme Court of Canada. It should be pointed
out here that the Ontario Court of Appeals’ decision
may take several months to come down.
“One of the crown’s favourite concerns, and this
reappeared over and over again during the three days of the
trial, is the matter of Métis identification. What
is a Métis? What defines a traditional Métis
life-style? Did Métis always hunt Moose? And it was
within the earliest moments of the trial that Ms. Sterling
found herself getting caught in a quagmire from which any
kind of rationale and sensible recovery seemed virtually impossible.
It seemed that the crown’s attorney was trying to present
the argument that only those cultural practices that were
carried on before contact could qualify for protection today.
As those Métis in the back of the courtroom did their
best to digest this thought, Justice Abella, with remarkable
restraint, tried to make clear to the crown that this thesis
was impossible because the Métis did not exist before
contact. It took at least an hour and a number of exchanges
between lawyer Sterling and Justice Abella before the crown
abandoned this most curious line of reasoning.
“The crown then moved on to the matter of the moose.
Although the crown seemed to allow that moose did not have
to wait for the arrival of the European in Canada to spring
into existence, they did argue that for a number of decades
there were no moose and therefore moose hunting could not
be considered an integral and traditional Métis activity.
It appears that there actually was quite a severe drop in
the moose population sometime in the middle of the nineteenth
century, but the crown tried to suggest that it was so severe
and so prolonged that the Métis forgot how to hunt
the animals—or something. I trust the gentle reader
will here allow the writer a mild personal interjection: as
this discussion of the moose proceeded I couldn’t help
looking around the courtroom and wondering how many of these
glib erudite black-robed lawyers had ever seen a moose, other
than those poor specimens found in the Metro Toronto Zoo and,
I suppose, these days one must add all those gaily painted
fibreglass moose randomly parked here and there on Toronto’s
sidewalks. In fact, I couldn’t help wondering how many
of them had ever been north of the Bloor and Yonge intersection
in the middle of Toronto....” |
