Ernest Cardinal and William James Cardinal have filed an appeal on fishing violations in the Court of Alberta but the court refused to hear it. The applicants were members of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation in Alberta. They were charged and convicted after they sold fish on the Beaver Lake Indian reserve without a commercial license, contrary to Regulation 203/1997 of the General Fisheries (Alberta) Legislation.
The Court has dismissed the case on the basis that the issues raised had already been determined by earlier findings of both the Alberta Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada. The applicants challenged the seminal case arguing that it was wrongly decided. In the original Cardinal decision, it was determined that section 12 of the Alberta Natural Resources Transfer Agreement (NRTA) made the provisions of the provincial Wildlife Act applicable to all Indians, including those on reserves.
After series of argument the court found that Cardinal had been affirmed in the 1990 decision of R v. Horseman, [1990] 1 SCR 901 [Horseman]. Horseman found that section 12 of the NRTA extinguished any treaty rights which previously allowed for commercial hunting, limiting Indians to hunting and fishing “for food” only. The Court stated that Alberta has the power to regulate the sale of fish in the province as confirmed in section 9 of the NRTA and subsections 92(13) and 92(16) of the Constitution Act, 1967.
