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Charter - Presumption of Statutory Conformity. Waterhen Lake First Nation v. Canada
In Waterhen Lake First Nation v. Canada (Fed CA, 2025) the Federal Court of Appeal dismissed a JR, here challenging the striking of a Specific Claims Tribunal claim dealing with 'traditional harvesting'.
Here, in obiter, the court comments on the statutory "presumption of conformity with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms":[116] The Tribunal’s approach is also supported by the recent decision of this Court in Little Black Bear First Nation v. Kawacatoose First Nation, 2024 FCA 119 at para. 80, leave to appeal to SCC pending, Court File 41458, 2024 CarswellNat 5015, which upheld as reasonable the Tribunal’s interpretation of an Order in Council creating a fishing reserve under Treaty 4, including its finding that, in the absence of genuine ambiguity, the Nowegijick principle had no application. After pointing to the passage from Osoyoos cited above, this Court noted that the Supreme Court of Canada had confirmed that courts need resort to external interpretive aids, like the principle of strict construction of penal laws or the presumption of conformity with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, only where a provision gives rise to a genuine or real ambiguity. This will occur if "“its words can reasonably be interpreted in more than one way after due consideration of the context in which they appear and of the purpose of the provision”" or, in other words, "“if differing readings of the same provision cannot be decisively resolved”" through the modern approach to statutory interpretation: LaPresse inc. v. Quebec, 2023 SCC 22 at para. 24, 485 D.L.R. (4th) 652. The Tribunal found no genuine ambiguity in the jurisdiction-conferring provisions of the Act. The Applicant has not established that this conclusion was unreasonable.
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