Working Group Speaker: Peter Bo Zhang

Working Group Speaker: Peter Bo Zhang

Title: Animals as Fiduciary Beneficiaries? A Reconceptualization of the Crown’s Fiduciary Duty under Section 35 Harvest Rights

Abstract: This paper argues that the non-human animals that make Indigenous harvest rights meaningful, such as salmon and moose, form the living corpus of those rights and should be recognized as fiduciary beneficiaries under section 35 of the Constitution. The Crown’s fiduciary duty has so far protected only human interests, leaving the ecological foundations of these rights to shifting conservation policy. Yet when the Crown controls the conditions of a species’ survival, its discretion engages the same duty of loyalty and care recognized in section 35 jurisprudence. Extending that duty to the living beings that sustain harvesting does not create new rights but fulfills the one that already exists. The paper grounds this duty in Indigenous guardianship, where ecological care becomes a constitutional practice, and concludes by addressing potential objections, including concerns about doctrinal overreach and the moral tension between animal protection and Indigenous legal traditions of reciprocity.

Bio: Peter Bo Zhang is a JD candidate at the University of Toronto. His research explores human-animal relations through the lenses of law, history, anthropology, STS, and religion. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Animal History, China’s Environmental History: A Reader (Columbia University Press), and International Handbook of Legal Language and Communication (Springer Nature). He holds a BA from McGill University and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge.

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