Alberta Metis hunters battle province in court

Calgary Herald

http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Alberta+Metis+hunters+battle+province+court/1556879/story.html

Alberta Metis hunters battle province in court
Riel descendant calls case 'pathetic'

By Darcy Henton, Edmonton Journal
May 2, 2009


Alberta's Metis people and the provincial government will square off in court in Medicine Hat on Monday for Round 1 of a historic battle that could be waged for decades over the province's interpretation of Metis hunting rights.

Six years after the Supreme Court of Canada ruled Metis have a constitutional right to fish, hunt and gather food, Alberta Metis say they have been forced to go to court to achieve full recognition of those rights.

Three Metis hunters who shot deer and antelope in southern Alberta are on trial for illegal hunting in the first of what is expected to be a series of cases involving more than 25 hunters.
The Medicine Hat case is expected to be tried intermittently over seven weeks spread over the course of the year.

Other Metis hunters who shot wild game in other parts of the province are slated to go to trial in stages after the first case is resolved.

Metis Nation of Alberta president Audrey Poitras said her 45,000 members may have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to assert rights Canada's top court has already ruled they have.

"There's absolutely no reason why we should even be in court," Poitras said. "We had an agreement that worked. If there needed to be changes, we had clauses in the agreement to do that."

Metis lawyer Jean Teillet said the province's insistence on prosecuting the charges in each region separately rather than bundling them into one provincewide case is a waste of court time and taxpayers' money.

"The way the Crown has this lined up, we'll be at this for the next 20 years," said Teillet, who won the landmark Powley case from Ontario in the Supreme Court of Canada in 2003.

She said she would be "very surprised" if she cannot prove there were Metis people in the Cypress Hills who have always hunted there.

"The evidence is overwhelming," said Teillet, a direct descendant of Metis leader Louis Riel. "It's like de-fending the fact the sun sets in the west. It would be funny if it wasn't so pathetic."

But Darcy Whiteside, spokesman for Alberta Sustainable Resource Development, said the department is confident it is applying the top court ruling correctly.

"The information that we have indicates that in southern Alberta, there was no Metis community that would meet the Powley requirement."

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