Peel decision expected in the fall

All week Na-cho Nyak Dun elder Jimmy Johnny sat quietly on the long, wooden courtroom bench, watching and listening as three lawyers and a judge wrangled over the future of the Peel watershed.

The stuffy confines of Yukon Supreme Court – which required Johnny to remove his trademark cowboy hat – was not only hundreds of miles, but literally worlds away, from the region's clear rivers, ancient camps and well-worn trails he holds so dear.

Besides being cowboy-in-residence, Johnny’s become a go-to guy for details on the Wind, Snake and Bonnet Plume country. After more than 50 years of guiding hunters in the region – a career he started in 1958  – he knows many a nook, cranny and mineral lick.

But even he tuned out the mind-numbing minutia of land use planning, final agreements and the Yukon's treatment of the Peel now and then during the 3 1/2-day trial.
 
“Lot of times when I hear lawyers or the judge talk and they use big words I don’t understand then I start thinking in Northern Tutchone,” he tells a klatch of reporters clustered around him in front of the courthouse Thursday.

Launching into several sentences in his own language – just long enough to make his point. “I just said, Why do we have lawyers talk in language we don’t understand, I don’t understand,” he said with a big grin.

Still and all he thought Thomas Berger did a good job. The B.C. land claims expert, now 81, represented Johnny’s First Nation, along with the Tr’ondek Hwech’in, Yukon Conservation Society and CPAWS-Yukon, in what they're calling a landmark lawsuit against the territorial government.

“Yes, I feel pretty good about it,” said Johnny, expressing the sentiment of many who'd piled into court to hear Berger pick off the arguments presented by the government the day before.
 
It blamed the Peel commission for all the plan’s woes, but Berger reminded the court the government was involved with four of the six commission member appointments.

“They threw the commission under the bus, but it was their commission,” he said.

The commission made many tough choices - they just weren't the ones the government wanted, he said. So when it received the commission’s final recommended plan, it walked away from the process, outlined in the Umbrella Final Agreement, and starting drafting a plan of its own.
 
From that point on it treated the commission’s plan – seven years in the making - like “a report they found on the internet" which had some "good ideas," said Berger.

Although the plaintiffs want the court to declare the commission's plan as the approved plan, the government told the court it can't do that.
 
If it decides the government strayed from the process laid out in the Umbrella Final Agreement, then there is no plan and it's back to square one, its lawyer John Hunter said.

Berger disagreed, saying that would simply reward the government which deliberately "thwarted the process" after it received the commission's final recommended plan.

That's where the things went off the track, he said, and that's where they should be put back on if the court decides it can't force the government to adopt the commission's plan.

Justice Ron Veale reserved his decision, saying only he’d hand it down “in due course.”  Most expect that to be sometime this fall.