OP-ED: Who really owns Canada?
Rubenstein writes, “No country in history has ever done more to protect and enhance the well-being of its indigenous people.”
Author: Hymie Rubenstein
Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report and REAL Israel & Palestine Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
The ever-growing “land back movement,” of which fulsome “land acknowledgements” are a critical part, was sparked by the Royal Proclamation of 1763, a declaration made following British victory in the Seven Years’ War against France and Spain, which cemented the conquest of what became Canada.
Enshrined in the 1982 constitution, the Proclamation is the foundational document of our sovereignty as a single nation-state.
Still, the Proclamation is itself rooted in earlier legislation.
On March 5, 1496, King Henry VII granted letters patent to John Cabot and his sons to claim new lands anywhere in the world so long as they did not intrude on Spanish or Portuguese possessions. This newly found land included what is now Canada but made no mention of its indigenous inhabitants.
Thirty-eight years later, the French explorer Jacques Cartier, acting on behalf of England’s King Francis I, defied Henry VII’s Letters Patent by claiming Canada for the French monarchy.
Nearly 300 years later, British victory in the Seven Years’ War once and for all extinguished that claim.
Dozens of indigenous land treaties, voluntarily signed, flowed from the Proclamation, nearly all based on the surrender of traditional territories and tribal self-determination in exchange for material benefits and the communal occupation of lands not ceded to the Crown. This occupation did not support individual or collective ownership of Indian Reserve lands.
Like other numbered agreements, Treaty No. 6, signed in 1876 with numerous Cree-speaking bands in Western Canada, reads:
“And the undersigned chiefs on their own behalf and on behalf of all other Indians inhabiting the tract [of land] within ceded, do hereby solemnly promise and engage to strictly observe this treaty, and also to conduct and behave themselves as good and loyal subjects of Her Majesty the Queen [Victoria].”
Recently negotiated indigenous land claims like the Robinson Huron Settlement (2023), the Cowichan Tribes Ruling (2025), the Haida Nation Agreement (2025), and the Musqueam Rights Deal (2026) should have acknowledged that despite the existence in law and fact of fee simple land ownership, all of Canada, including the treaty lands of the indigenous peoples, has belonged to the British Crown at least since the days of John Cabot:
“The land of Canada is solely owned by King Charles III who is also the head of state…. The Canadian Act has no provision for any Canadian to own physical land in Canada. Canadians can only own an interest in an estate.”
There is yet another challenge to what is increasingly called “stolen land” by indigenous activists: pre-contact inter-group conflict and warfare. Historical documents like the 18,000-page Jesuit Relations (1632-1673) based on the reports of Roman Catholic missionary priests report that Canada’s original inhabitants mutilated, tortured to death, cannibalized, and drove away their enemies (prevalent in southern Ontario and Quebec); enslaved members of neighbouring groups (common among West coast tribes); massacred competitors for land and resources (widespread on the Prairies); and exterminated entire ethnic groups (as in the annihilation of almost all the Huron by the Iroquois in 1648-1649).
None of these heinous activities – conquest, colonization, ethnic cleansing, assimilation, and genocide – still common around the world even today, were accompanied by any declared “land back movement,” though they did fall under the law of conquest, an age-old principle only technically abrogated in the contested area of international law during the mid-20th century.
Still, throughout most of human history and prehistory, conquered land was never seen as synonymous with “stolen land.”
What today’s land back proponents also ignore is that, unlike so many other places in the world, including Western Europe, where even the names of most preliterate indigenous groups disappeared millennia ago, the post-contact European treatment of Canada’s first settlers involved neither genocide, nor slavery, nor ethnic cleansing, nor total assimilation, nor tribute extraction.
Yes, there was the suppression of the North-West Rebellion in 1885, resulting in the notorious but haphazardly enforced pass system, but Canada had nothing resembling the many tragic Indian Wars in America. On the contrary, despite many small and large injustices from first contact to the present, European settlement starting in 1535 eventually resulted in: permanent pacification (the abolition of tribal warfare); the free and lively exchange of aboriginal products for European manufactured goods for 250 years; and an Indian Act (1876) and the Constitution Act (1982) – both rooted in the Royal Proclamation of 1763 – which defined, enhanced, and preserved special rights and privileges for aboriginals.
Indeed, warts and all, no country in history has ever done more to protect and enhance the well-being of its indigenous people.
Still, radical indigenous activists and their non-indigenous supporters continue to drive an anti-conquest, anti-colonization crusade based on demands for the return of indigenous lands, complete indigenous sovereignty, and financial reparations for the loss of both.
All three are based on shaky grounds. The roaming bands of foragers comprising most pre-contact peoples occupied constantly shifting, overlapping territories.
None of these tiny groups possessed or practiced sovereign nationhood based on unique languages, legal systems, and cultures. As for reparations, indigenous people and their organizations have received tens of billions of dollars since Confederation in 1867.
Given these considerations, the exploding land back movement, now fortified by false land acknowledgments, is only serving to exacerbate hatred of Canada – one of the greatest, freest, and most compassionate nations in the history of the world – by growing cadres of indigenous extremists painfully ignorant of both their own pre-contact, conquest-based past and the complex legal and political history of a country in which they are first and foremost privileged Canadian citizens.