bars, those being ones with lots of natives in them.

I'm with box on that one.

"Chief" is another one that can easily lead to fisticuffs.

The really big one that will get you simultaneously pounded upon by everyone within arms' reach is "wagon burner". That'll lose you your face in pretty much no time flat.

That said, I understand why they didn't hear the appeal. The case is not civil in nature, but is instead civil... and the area in question falls under the provincial purview. It's not their case to hear, basically; this is the Supreme Court telling the province that they need to revisit their legislation as well as reviewing their executive practices (this would be the guidelines that they've given to the provincial court system about how to deal with these sorts of complaints).

In short, any decision that they would have made would have been unconstitutional on the face of it. The NBHRC should have known that. I suspect that this was done to get the mucky mucks at the NBHRC off the hook: "see, we did every possible thing that we could to deal with this".

That said, I'm very disappointed in the lack of coverage in Canadian media. Think I'll write a letter of complaint; this is a case of national interest and should be covered. I've discovered that a lot of people here have a lot of confusion about the relative areas of jurisdiction of provinces and Canada; this kind of story could have had an educational effect about that if reported properly (which, needless to say, wouldn't have happened anyway).

Basically, this is similar in nature as to why the US Supreme Court declined to review the Shiavo case, until they were forced to by executive fiat; it's was the state/province's right and responsibility to legislate and manage the issue.