After 170 years following Canada legal battle, Beach returned to First Nation
30-Aug-2025.
170 years after it was mistakenly omitted from its reserve a stretch of beach will be returned to a First Nation in Canada.
The sandy sliver of land measures less than two miles long, but has nonetheless sparked an outsized battle, with a nearby resort town claiming the case sets a foreboding precedent for property rights in the country.
It would not hear a challenge from the town of South Bruce Peninsula, which is contesting a lower court’s ruling that the Saugeen First Nation’s reserve was erroneously smaller than promised, Canada’s supreme court said on Thursday.
The town warned that a victory for the First Nation would “risk sowing uncertainty and unpredictability at the core of Canada’s system of private landholding’’, in its application to the country’s highest court.
The case was simply about the correct interpretation of a treaty and the boundaries of the First Nations reserve under that agreement, lawyers for the First Nation instead said.
Central to the fight is a stretch of beach popular in the summer months with tourists, who trek 140 miles from Toronto to enjoy the clear blue waters of Lake Huron.
The Saugeen First Nation has claimed for decades that the official map of their reserve wrongly omitted a 1.5 mile stretch of beach promised to them under an 1854 treaty with the crown.
In 2014, a truce looked likely after the First Nation and the municipality agreed that Saugeen would hold title over the land and the beach would be co-managed by Saugeen and the town council. The federal and provincial governments also pledged to make a one-time payment of C$5m (US$3.6m) to the municipality to offset their portion of the beach costs.
But during municipal elections that year, mayoral candidates pledged to quash the agreement, pushing the land claims fight to the courts – and subsequently costing the community millions in legal fees.
Two years ago, the First Nation emerged victorious and their win was upheld at the Ontario court of appeal. Earlier this year, the large sign welcoming visitors to Sauble Beach was changed to Saugeen Beach – a move seen as an ‘’important and long overdue act of reclamation’’ by the First Nation.
Lawyers for the municipality and the private landowners have framed the previous court victories for Saugeen as precedent-setting, suggesting they are the first in Canada to be dispossessed of real estate to settle a treaty case.
“The importance of these questions cannot be understated,” the town’s submission reads. “They strike at the very heart of Canada’s constitutional order, and will be increasingly brought into focus as Indigenous land claims over private property work their way through the courts over the next decade.”
Nuri Frame, a lawyer representing the First Nation, said the case was much narrower in scope.
“We’re talking about a very specific, very precise parcel of reserve land that was set aside for the Saugeen. The crown had failed to properly survey and demarcate that in the 19th century. It is very much a case that is about its facts, the language of this particular treaty, the scope of this particular reserve and the relationship between this particular First Nation and the crown,” he said, adding that at trial, the federal government admitted their error and had sided with the First Nation.
Nuri Frame said, “Almost every historic treaty that were entered into between confederation and 1921, they just promised that a reserve will be created and they prescribed a formula to be used to establish a reserve, for example how many acres per person or family and then a surveyor goes out and draws a map”.
“There are very, very few treaties in Canada that do what Saugeen’s does, which says the reserve is going to go from here to here to here to here.”
