On April 23, 2021, the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) released its decision in
R. v. Desautel, 2021 SCC 17, which upheld the lower court decisions to acquit Richard Desautel of charges under the
Wildlife Act. The SCC confirmed his Aboriginal right to hunt in the Arrow Lakes area of British Columbia, even though he is a resident and citizen of the United States.
This case raised novel questions about the territorial scope of the phrase aboriginal peoples of Canada in section 35 of the
Constitution Act, 1982. The Court decided that section 35 Aboriginal rights can extend to Aboriginal peoples who are not citizens or residents of Canada, even though the modern-day successor Aboriginal group that holds those rights no longer occupies the same geographical area where the historic pre-contact collective exercised those rights.