ABSTRACT
Several factors make the dynamics of this policy arena different from the interplay of ethics, language and policy development in other policy arenas. First, Aboriginal rights are, as Dickson C.J.C. observed in Guérin, sui generis,1 i.e., they constitute “their own kind or class” and are “unique.”2 The contestation of the meaning, nature and reality of these unique rights has been a major theme running throughout the history of First Nations relations3 and forms the major part of the discourse for which an analytical framework is wanted here. Secondly, there is, to my knowledge, no other field in which senior officials have testified before parliamentary committees that it is the objective of government policy to end the presence of an ethnic group or nationality in Canada.4
