The Greenbelt: Digging up new facts

Vincent J. Curtis

27 Mar 23

RE: Missing the story on Indigenous rights.  Op-ed by Paul Racher.  The Hamilton Spectator 27 Mar 23.  This is novel effort to derail, or at least to discredit, the opening of “greenbelt” lands to housing development.  The writer invokes alleged aboriginal rights issues.

Burlington archeologist Paul Racher thinks he’s dug up new facts to stop encroachment on the Greenbelt; but all he’s found are lumps of fool’s gold.

Between 1792 and 1818, the British Crown purchased from the Mississaugas of the Credit the lands associated with the greenbelt.  There was no treaty; it was a land purchase.  The purchases were to separate peacefully European settlers from Indians, and this separation was strictly adhered to and enforced by both sides.  There was no agreement which allowed armed Indians to traipse through British lands allegedly on the hunt for game.

There may be treaties over land acquisitions which admit to residual aboriginal rights, but the greenbelt area hasn’t one.  There is no “duty to consult,” for if I sell my land to Mr. Racher, I don’t have a residual right to grow and harvest vegetables in my old garden.

When Mr. Racher says, “When greenbelt land is opened for housing development those lands will no longer be available to the First Nations for the traditional uses that were promised them,” he’s gone off the rails.  The First Nation we’re speaking of is the Mississaugas of the Credit, with whom a final settlement payment of $145 million was made in 2010.  By Racher’s reasoning the past growth of Hamilton, Burlington, and Toronto denied the Mississauga “traditional use,” which, to be specific, was hunting beaver for the fur trade, now exhausted.  This argument that development is forbidden because it denies the Mississaugas traditional use of the land they sold to the British Crown is untenable.

It’s a novel argument by Mr. Racher to try to halt development of McGuinty’s Sop to his environmentalists by invoking mysterious, vague aboriginal issues; but when you pull back the curtain and look at the specifics, the argument falls apart.  The story of Indigenous rights was missed because there isn’t one.

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