| Summary: | Liberal individualism and group-differentiated rights are not
incompatible with one another, as has often been suggested in Canadian
political discourse. In order to make self-defining choices, and to be the
autonomous free-choosing individuals that are central to liberal theory,
individuals require a range of options from which to choose and a means
of differentiating between those options. An individual's culture provides
him or her with both of these necessary elements of autonomous free
choice. But while Canadians share a common culture by virtue of their
membership in a Canadian moral community, there is no single Canadian
identity. Some Canadians, such as aboriginal peoples, are Canadian
through being members of minority national groups which have distinct
cultures of their own. In order to ensure that liberal equality is extended
to all citizens of Canada, the complexity of Canadian identities must be
reflected in government policy-making. In this thesis, I develop a set of
theoretical propositions about group-differentiated rights in Canada, and
apply them to aboriginal fisheries policy-making in British Columbia. I
propose a policy that reflects those theoretical propositions and compare
it with the federal government's Aboriginal Fisheries Strategy (AFS).
Fishing rights are the only aboriginal rights to have run the full
gamut from being traditional aboriginal practices, to being defined as
aboriginal rights by the Supreme Court of Canada, to being recognized
through government policy. The aboriginal fisheries policy that I propose
in this thesis would be more extensive than was the AFS. The proposed
policy would maintain the AFS' structure of individual fisheries
agreements negotiated between aboriginal nations and the Department of
Fisheries and Oceans. But the proposed policy would also include
provisions for significant aboriginal management of their local fisheries,
as well as for aboriginal involvement in the development of a province-wide
fisheries management regime.
|
|---|
