The Tsilhqot'in Nation sought a declaration of their Aboriginal title to and other Aboriginal rights over a portion of their traditional territory west of Williams Lake in British Columbia. After a lengthy trial, Justice Vickers of the BC Supreme Court found that the nation's Aboriginal rights to hunt, fish, gather, and capture wild horses had been established. He also found that they had met the Delgamuukw test (1997) for title (exclusive occupation at the time of Crown assertion of sovereignty in 1846) for part of the claim area, but he declined to issue a declaration of title because of a defect in the pleadings (the area over which title had been proven was not the whole claim area). The BC Court of Appeal was willing to overlook that defect, but decided that Justice Vickers had applied the wrong test: the test for Aboriginal title is site-specific (see R. v. Marshall; R. v. Bernard, 2005), and not territorial as Justice Vickers thought.
On appeal, the Supreme Court issued a declaration of title over the area where Justice Vickers found that the requisite exclusive occupation had been established. In doing so, the Court took a territorial approach. It also decided that the standard for proving Aboriginal title is less than the standard for proving adverse possession. It affirmed the Court's decision in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia (1997) that Aboriginal title entails the entire beneficial interest in the land, so the Crown's underlying title has no beneficial content whatsoever.
The Court also said that properly-drafted provincial legislation could infringe Aboriginal title if justified under the Sparrow test (1990, Period 8 above), even though Parliament has exclusive jurisdiction over "Indians, and Lands reserved for the Indians" (Constitution Act, 1867, s. 91(24)). In so doing, the Court decided that Aboriginal rights are no longer within the core of that federal jurisdiction and so are not protected against provincial laws by the doctrine of interjurisdictional immunity (see Delgamuukw and R. v. Morris, 2006), where the Court had come to the opposite conclusion).