An "Indigenous Corporate Training" organization says that the "Doctrine of Discovery" is the basis of Canadian Law. Not true.
First of all: never trust "training" -- too much like molding and grooming. (And brainwashing.) Secondly, the antecedents of the evolution of Law in Canada came way before that Age of Exploration during which Europeans found their way to other continents. Canadian (British-based) law has roots in Celtic and Druidic justice, pre-Anglo-Saxon. Those communities settled disputes in much subtler ways than historians often give them credit for.
When European explorers discovered that North and South America existed (having previously discovered that the Earth was round, and therefore deciding to sail around it), they found tribes that settled disputes through raids, warfare, and the taking of slaves (a fact which they noted but today's commentators are loathe to acknowledge).
Who has sovereignty over a landscape? Not humanity, humans living but a moment on a planet billions of years old which has hosted a churning cauldron of billions of other species. But, our fundamental transitoriness notwithstanding, the practical arrangement is that national governments have sovereignty over citizens -- and in a democracy use it in protection of life, liberty and property for all citizens equally.
During the Age of Discovery and the Age of Settlement, democracy too was being discovered, and developed in Europe and North America simultaneously.
Where do property rights come from? From legal use, i.e. from working the land. Where your labour goes, you have ownership interest. To buy, sell and bequeath your interest, government sets up Land Title Offices. (Settlers didn't find such offices among the tribes they encountered in the "New World", so they proceeded under Old World legalities.)
When non-Catholic monarchies like the British claimed territory (as in Canada) they made claim against other monarchies, not against aboriginals living there. With the multiplicity of aboriginal groups they made Peace and Friendship Treaties, exhibiting the opposite of dispossession (see the Royal Proclamation of King George III, 1763).
The organized legal transference of real estate (land) is a foundation of peaceful society. Is that a thing we want to throw away, adopting a Doctrine of Strife instead of a Doctrine of Discovery?
No. Nor did people want to in Canada's colonial years; in fact the way they (as it turned out, naively) thought they'd include aboriginal people in the mainstream of opportunity was through education -- but we know how that turned out. Education takes more than a generation, and we see now that schooling shouldn't have been left in the hands of punitive clergy with rigid religious agenda of their own.
Their punitive harshness wreaked misery on generations of white students also ... but that, in contemporary thinking, is overlooked. No doubt in future those students too will stake a claim to compensation.
