By Staff Reporter
Analysis. This article is reported from court filings and published accounts of the trial, and it includes the Chronicle’s editorial view, which is marked as such.
TORONTO — Three weeks into the trial that Six Nations of the Grand River waited 31 years to get, the Crown’s defence has come down to a simple claim about history: whatever happened to the Haudenosaunee and the Grand River lands, the Canada and Ontario of today are not the ones who owe for it.
“Canada did not inherit the liability of the Crown,” a federal lawyer told Justice Ira Parghi of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in opening statements on Oct. 6, the Two Row Times reported. Ontario’s lawyer went further, telling the court that the province did not even exist as a legal entity when the Haldimand Proclamation was signed in 1784.
Canada’s own court filings tell a more complicated story. In its statement of defence, Ottawa says that from 1834 to 1847 about $160,000 of Six Nations money went into the Grand River Navigation Company, that “the investment was lost,” and that from 1925 to 1932 Parliament put $164,938.61 into roads, a hospital and an electric plant on the reserve to make up for it. Canada says it “at all times denied liability” for that loss. It still paid toward it.
Where the case stands
The lawsuit, Six Nations of the Grand River Band of Indians v. The Attorney General of Canada and His Majesty the King in Right of Ontario, was filed in Brantford in 1995 and is now Toronto court file CV-18-00594281-0000. The trial opened Oct. 5 and is split into two phases. The first will decide whether the Crown is liable on the 46 claims Six Nations has brought. A second phase would set damages and sort out Canada and Ontario’s claims against each other.
The court has scheduled 350 court days, running to Dec. 31, 2027, The Hamilton Spectator reported. A federal briefing note prepared last November for Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Rebecca Alty said the liability phase alone could last “up to five years.” A federal government document puts the claims’ value somewhere between $13.9 billion and $8.7 trillion.
The fight over what the case is about started before the first witness. In an Aug. 12 ruling, 2026 ONSC 4561, Justice Parghi held that Six Nations’ claim, as written, “does not advance any interest in, or seek to recover, any land in the Haldimand Tract currently held by the Crown.” Six Nations had argued that it had pleaded land-related remedies against Crown-held land. The judge found the claim seeks money: equitable compensation, damages and an accounting. All parties had already agreed that no land held by private owners is at stake.
Then the Crown went after the map. During the first week, federal lawyers spent days questioning Phil Monture, who directed Six Nations’ land claims research office from 1975 to 2002 and whose work underpins the case. A Crown lawyer told him he was not a “cartographer.” According to the Two Row Times, Justice Parghi agreed that the Six Nations map of the tract, drawn by the Lands and Resources department using GIS software, could not be relied on as accurate.
In its opening statement, Canada had also argued that the 1784 proclamation did not specify, with maps or surveys, the exact layout of the grant.
Mr. Monture did not dwell on the cross-examination. “It’s been over a 50-year journey. It’s about remembering those before us,” he told Turtle Island News. “And I hope we get justice.”
On the stand, he told the court, “That’s all we ever ask for, is fairness and justice.”
Elected Chief Sherri-Lyn Hill testified the following week. She described a childhood in nearby Waterford marked by “a lot of discrimination, a lot of racism,” and a father who was shot at and had his teeth kicked out, the Two Row Times reported. “Elected council is the legal governing body of Six Nations of the Grand River,” she told the court. “We advocate for our rights, jurisdiction, safety and well-being of our community.” Turtle Island News described her as at times flustered on the stand.
The promise, as Six Nations tells it
The Haudenosaunee — the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora — fought beside the British in the American Revolution and lost their homelands in what is now upstate New York when the war was lost. Haldimand first proposed land near Kingston, and Mohawk leader Joseph Brant asked instead for the Grand River valley, Canada’s own lawyers told the court.
On Oct. 25, 1784, Governor Frederick Haldimand answered with a document under his seal. In the words of the Six Nations statement of claim, it allotted the Six Nations the lands “six miles from each side of the river beginning at Lake Erie and extending in that proportion to the head of the Grand River,” which they and their descendants “were to enjoy forever.” That is about 950,000 acres. Six Nations holds about 46,000 acres today, less than 5 percent of it.
Six Nations says the shrinking began almost at once.
- The Simcoe Patent. In 1793, Lt. Gov. John Graves Simcoe drew up a patent for the Grand River lands that did not run to the river’s source. Six Nations says its leaders told Simcoe the tract ran to the headwaters and rejected his draft, and that those northern lands were never lawfully released. Canada says the patent fully carried out the Crown’s intentions.
- The Welland Canal. Dams built for the Welland Canal’s feeder works between about 1829 and 1835 flooded roughly 3,500 to 3,800 acres of Six Nations land. Six Nations says that although the statute required compensation, it was never paid for the land. The canal company paid only individual occupants for their improvements.
- The Grand River Navigation Company. Six Nations says that beginning in 1834, the Crown put its trust money into “worthless shares and debentures” of a canal company it opposed. Canada says the council consented on the recommendation of Lt. Gov. John Colborne. Both sides agree the money was lost.
- The 1841 ‘surrender.’ On Jan. 18, 1841, Chief Superintendent of Indian Affairs Samuel Jarvis obtained the signatures of seven people on a paper agreeing to the government “disposing of the land” on the Grand River. Six Nations says the seven were never authorized to sign, that no specific lands or survey were attached, and that Jarvis was later dismissed after a commission of inquiry. Jarvis had written that he would not recommend removing squatters from unsurrendered Six Nations land.
“All of our money, all of our lands were sold to run the colonial government of Upper Canada for about 60 years,” Lonny Bomberry, director of Six Nations Lands and Resources, told CBC News. “By the 1860s, we were completely broke and a million acres gone through what I call the heart of Canada and nothing to show for it.”
Six Nations’ research, to be entered into evidence, alleges that trust money also went to McGill University, the Law Society of Upper Canada, railways and public works, The Spectator reported in 2024. Canada’s answer is that “over decades, the Six Nations people made a series of valid surrenders and sales of lands within the tract.”
Two governments, one claim
The plaintiff in the case is the elected band council. Ottawa installed that council in October 1924, ending the administrative role of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy Chiefs Council. The year before, Cayuga Chief Deskaheh had travelled to Geneva on a Six Nations passport to ask the League of Nations to recognize the Six Nations as a sovereign nation. The League would not let him address the assembly, the Canadian Encyclopedia notes. He died in 1925.
That history is still present in the courtroom. The Haudenosaunee Development Institute’s bid to intervene for the Confederacy was denied. “Council didn’t exist when treaties were made,” Kanien’kehá:ka Chief Allan McNaughton told CBC. “They are not a treaty-making entity.” He said the Confederacy prefers arbitration and will not appear before a “foreign court.”
Six Nations also did not reach the courtroom on its own. It sued in 1995 after slow progress on 29 land claims along the tract, only one of which had been settled, the Spectator reported. The suit was put on hold after the 2006 Douglas Creek Estates reclamation in Caledonia, when Ontario paid at least $12.3 million to take the land out of the dispute. Negotiations then collapsed, and the case resumed in 2009. The Caledonia site sits on Highway 6, the old Plank Road, and the Plank Road lands are among the claims in this trial. At the time, Canada and Ontario maintained that the land had been surrendered in 1841.
“Six Nations had filed for that land under Canada’s specific claims policy,” Mr. Monture told the court. “Frustration took over.”
The same frustration produced 1492 Land Back Lane in Caledonia in 2020. In December 2022, a judge granted the developer a permanent injunction against the land defenders there.
Editorial view: The Crown should not be allowed to hide behind its own reorganizations
Canada and Ontario are entitled to a defence, and the court will rightly test every map and every ledger. But the core of the Crown’s position should trouble anyone who believes a promise means something. The Haudenosaunee did not choose to have their treaty partner reorganize itself from an imperial Crown into Upper Canada, then the Province of Canada, then a Dominion and a province. Each of those changes was made by the Crown, for the Crown’s convenience. Nearly all of the land and money now in question passed through those governments’ hands. To say no successor is answerable is to say the promise to enjoy the land “forever” had an expiry date that nobody told Six Nations about.
The record also undercuts the claim that this is ancient history with no living debtor. Ottawa paid toward the Navigation Company loss in the 1920s while denying it owed anything. The Crown held the trust accounts, issued the patents and accepted the surrenders. By Six Nations’ account of the Jarvis letters of 1841, it also refused to remove squatters from land that had never been surrendered. These are not Six Nations’ inventions. They are in the Crown’s own papers, and in the case of the Navigation Company, in Canada’s own pleading.
Six Nations has been plain that it does not want to break anyone. “We’re not asking to break Canada, or Ontario,” Mr. Bomberry told the Spectator in 2024. “We’re hopeful that the Crowns will come to their senses and say, ‘Look, this is too big. Let’s talk about settling this.’” Robert Janes of JFK Law, who leads the Six Nations legal team, has said the nation remains “open to achieving reconciliation outside the court.”
In last year’s briefing note, Ottawa said it “values its relationship with Six Nations of the Grand River.” The fairest way to show that is not another decade of litigation over whether anyone is answerable. It is a serious offer at the table, made while the elders who carried this claim are still alive to see it.
What the governments say
Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada told CBC it respects Six Nations’ decision to go to court “and will continue to work in co-operation with all parties as this case moves forward.” Ontario’s Ministry of the Attorney General declined CBC’s interview request. Ontario has said in its pleadings that if any duty tied to the proclamation was breached, Canada alone is liable.
The Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, whose 1784 treaty with the British made the Grand River lands available, is an intervener. It supports holding the Crown to account but does not agree that the proclamation was a treaty, and it seeks no compensation.
Following the trial
The trial is being heard in person at the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Toronto and streamed through a registration-only Zoom webinar. Six Nations is holding community viewings on the territory. Pleadings and court orders are posted at sngrlitigation.com. The Chronicle will cover each day of proceedings.
Earlier coverage: Six Nations’ Haldimand Tract lawsuit is finally on trial, and its roots run through New York.
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