Canada

The day lawyers submitted paperwork to the Supreme Court of Canada, another group quietly set up ladders in the dead of night to change a sign symbolic in a decades-long legal dispute in an Ontario beach town.

The red retro-lettered sign at the end of Main Street in the town of South Bruce Peninsula read "Welcome to Saugeen Beach" when sun seekers woke up on Canada Day this week to look out at Lake Huron.

The sign had previously ushered people to "Sauble Beach," a tourist hotspot since the 1920s. Sporting restaurants and cottages, and town and private land are squeezed between two sections of reserve territory belonging to Chippewas of Saugeen First Nation.

The band declared victory at the end of 2024 when the Ontario Court of Appeal sided with Saugeen First Nation, saying the federal government had breached the treaty it signed in 1854. It ruled that roughly 2.2 kilometres of shoreline land incorrectly surveyed in 1855 should be returned to the First Nation.