Last week the Federal Court of Appeals overturned a lower court’s decision to uphold tax exemption for 30,000 Native Canadians not living on reservations. When Native leaders signed Treaty 8 in 1899, they were supposedly assured by the government that the document protected them from any future taxation. This promise, however, was never written into the document, thus the Federal Court of Appeals claims that it has never officially existed and needn’t be upheld any longer. Native leaders are furious and prepared to take the case to Canada’s Supreme Court.
