Treaty and Land Claim Negotiations Editing and Proofreading Services

Treaty and land claim negotiations produce documents that will govern relationships for generations, negotiated by people who will not see most of their consequences. The agreements are long, technical, and drafted by lawyers for three parties with different interests and different theories of what is being agreed. And at the end of it, the whole thing must be explained to community members who will vote on it — many of whom will read only the summary, and all of whom are being asked to make a decision on behalf of descendants.

We edit what negotiating parties, First Nations, Métis and Inuit governments and government negotiation offices produce — framework agreements and agreements-in-principle, final agreement chapters and their plain-language summaries, ratification and voting information for community members, information sessions and question-and-answer material, negotiation mandates and briefing documents, side agreements and implementation plans, fiscal financing and transfer arrangements, land selection and mapping documentation, harvesting, resource and co-management provisions, self-government chapters and governance transition planning, specific claim submissions and research reports, historical and oral history evidence, and implementation monitoring and review reporting. We follow the terminology each party uses for itself and its territory, including in its own language.

The certainty provision is the hardest thing in these agreements to explain and the one community members most need explained. Governments require certainty about what rights exist after the agreement; the technique used — release, modification, non-assertion or exhaustive definition — determines what happens to rights not addressed by the agreement, including rights nobody has thought of yet. Summaries routinely reduce this to a sentence saying the agreement provides certainty for all parties, which is accurate and tells a voter nothing about what they are being asked to give up. We work on these so the mechanism is named and described in ordinary words, so what is preserved and what is not is set out side by side, so the position of rights that might be recognised by courts in future is addressed honestly rather than elided, and so any disagreement between the parties about what the provision means is disclosed rather than smoothed over. A community that votes yes understanding this provision has ratified something; one that votes yes without understanding it has stored up a grievance for the generation that discovers it.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including material under negotiation, mandates and legal advice. We are editors rather than lawyers, negotiators or historians, and we offer no view on any position, claim or provision. What we can do is make the plain-language material genuinely plain and the technical documents internally consistent.