Public Policy Sources #38:
Conclusion

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Making treaties among Canadians is a very important business. It is essential that the principles to be followed are well articulated, understood, and supported by the general community. That has not been the case to date.

The principles cited above are intended to contribute to that end. There are four over-riding ideas.

The first is the importance of maintaining flexibility as we proceed with experiments in this field so littered with past failures, rather than constitutionalizing solutions before they have been tried and found successful.

The second is ensuring that solutions have general community support, not just in the tribe concerned, but in the province and the country. If such support is missing, the solutions will fail, no matter how theoretically brilliant the construct.

The third is an insistence on the dignity and worth of individuals, with the collectivity being in a subordinate position. Its powers must always be justified by, and only with reference to, service to the individual.

The final idea, which runs through every particular question to be considered, is that of maintaining the maximum possible harmony with the rest of Canadian society. The practical reason is that without a broad consensus on common citizenship values, funding and other relationships will always be at risk in the trials and strains that always come with an uncertain future. To put it plainly, solutions that are not supported by Canadians generally will not in the long run be funded by Canadians generally.

But even more basic than that, Canadian values such as equality, democracy, accountability, the coupling of entitlement with responsibility, tolerance of diversity, mobility rights, and so on, are so fundamental and cherished that it is difficult to see how any relationship not based on such things could long or happily endure.

These value references are not mere platitudes. They are genuine issues when one assesses proposals for embedding by treaty small, special-purpose, closed, and culturally homogeneous societies in a large and pluralistic open society.

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