Meech Lake Accord Case Study

With the 1990 Meech Lake Accord resulting in failure, succeeding it was the Charlottetown Accord in 1992. While primarily focusing on the Issues of Quebec at the time it did also address “the issue of Aboriginal self-government but provided for a waiting period of three years before the concept would be recognized in law. It also dealt with aboriginal representation in Parliament (Gall).” Through a total of five rounds of constitutional politics, the First Nations peoples were managing to achieve some recognition of their right to govern by consent (Russell 169, “Constitutional Odyssey”). However, the process was far from easy, it has been thus far, far from easy. During the Charlotte Accords was no exception, “reaching an accord with [First
This commission was carried forward following the Oka Crisis that took place in 1990 (Doerr). The relevance of this commission is the fact that the report submitted, instructing that there is a necessity of reconstructing relations between First Nations peoples and the average Canadian (Doerr). The purpose of the commission was to collect data and provide recommendations based upon the data collected to the government (Doerr). However, implementing the recommendations within the Commission would have required for the constitution to be amended (Doerr). The report was released in 1996 and it had accurately addressed that the government would be required “to commit to a new set of ethical principles respecting the relationship between [First Nations] peoples and the state (Doerr).” When the report had been released, the federal government made a commitment to studying it and finding ways of implementing its recommendations (Doerr). The issue that occurred was that there was a jurisdictional problem, one that has been cemented in Canada for some time. It was the framework of the Federal and Provincial governments, the Federal government could make all the promises it wants, however the provincial governments also need to be on board, hence there was little to no responses provided by the provincial governments, as they themselves viewed it as a federal initiative