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29 U. Brit. Colum. L. Rev. 143 (1995)
If Quebec Secedes from Canada Can the Cree Secede from Quebec

handle is hein.journals/ubclr29 and id is 153 raw text is: IF QUEBEC SECEDES FROM CANADA CAN THE CREE SECEDE FROM QUEBEC? DOUGLAS SANDERSt The question has arisen in Canada of whether a secession of Quebec from the Canadian federation would legally or politically allow the indigenous peoples of Quebec to make their own choices, whether for Quebec, for Canada or for independence. When is secession possible? East Pakistan became Bangladesh in a civil war. For many years it was the major example of a successful secession. In the same period the secessionist war in Biafra failed. The region remains within Nigeria. On the basis of outcome, one struggle was a war of liberation, the other an internal civil war.1 The interna- tional political order recognizes Tibet as part of China; the Kurdish lands as parts of Iraq, Iran and Turkey; and Quebec as part of Canada. The International Court of Justice recognized independent political rights for the people of the Western Sahara, but those rights continue to be denied in practice.2 The breakup of the Soviet Union and of Yugo- slavia has created a number of new states, but bitter fighting continues in some localities over independence or borders. Occasionally there are rearrangements within existing states, recog- nizing some new form of internal autonomy. The separate canton of Jura was created in Switzerland on ethnic grounds, following complex negotiations and votes. Hong Kong will be reunited with China, but with a high degree of autonomy. Catalonia gained a regional parlia- ment and continues to act more and more like a separate state. Green- land has home rule and might eventually go its own way.3 Canada has t Professor of Law, Faculty of Law, University of British Columbia. © Douglas Sanders, 1995. 1 The problem of explaining these two examples is illustrated in the literature. See, for example, J. N. Saxena, Sel-Determination: From Biafra to Bangladesh (Bombay:Tripathi, 1978). 2 Re Western Sahara (1975) I.CJ. Rep. 6; H. A. Amankwah, Self-Determination in the Spanish Sahara (x98i) 14 CILJSA 34. 3 The handling of Greenland by Denmark has been questioned; see G. AIfredsson, Greenland and the Law of Political Decolonization (1982) 25 Ger. Yearb. Int'l L 29o.