Speaking & media.

Free, prior and informed consent — what it is, what it isn’t, and how your First Nation can best use it

Free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) has gone from contested principle to legislated standard in less than a decade, but the gap between what FPIC requires and what governments and proponents are actually delivering is wide, and getting wider.

Drawing on litigation and consultation work for Indigenous governments across Canada, this session is for First Nations leadership, legal counsel, and consultation staff. We’ll cover what UNDRIP actually says about FPIC, what the federal UNDRIP Act requires and emerging case law on similar legislation, the difference between consultation and consent in practice, and where Nations have the most leverage to insist that consent means consent.

Making space for Indigenous peoples and legal orders in administrative justice

Indigenous legal orders, like Canadian common law and Quebec civil law, are part of Canada’s multi-juridical identity. They’re not cultural curiosities, and they are not a parallel system to be tolerated.

Indigenous legal orders are bodies of law, with substantive content and procedural rigour, that have governed these territories for far longer than Canadian common law has. The harder question is what administrative justice in Canada looks like when it takes that fact seriously.

This session draws on practice before tribunals, regulators, and inquests where Indigenous legal orders have been treated as a source of binding norms rather than a cultural consideration, and the structural reforms that would make space for that approach more widely.

Translating law into policy — what politicians get right, and what they keep getting wrong

Most politicians are not lawyers, and most policy decisions about Indigenous peoples are made by people who have read about Canadian law, not litigated it. The result is a policy landscape where some things are getting genuinely better, and other things are getting worse for predictable, structural, and avoidable reasons.

This session is for elected officials, political staff, decision makers, policy researchers, and journalists. We’ll work through what the courts have actually said about Indigenous rights in a period of rapid legal development, where the policy response has tracked the law, and where the law and the policy have drifted dangerously apart.

The rule of… what law, exactly? What “the rule of law” means for reconciliation

“The rule of law” gets invoked constantly in the public conversation about Indigenous rights, and almost never explained. When pipelines are being protested, the rule of law. When First Nations win an Aboriginal title case, the rule of law. The problem is not that the phrase is being misused. The problem is that the phrase has been doing this kind of work — disenfranchising Indigenous peoples while presenting itself as neutral — since long before the present moment.

This session unpacks how “the rule of law” has been misused as both a sword and a shield against Indigenous peoples, and what reconciliation requires us to do about it.