Commentary
Passed into law by Parliament in 1876, Canada’s Indian Act has always been, and remains today, inherently discriminatory because it creates a separate legal status for one group of Canadians based on their race, ethnicity, or ancestry.
In 1969, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau proposed abolishing the Indian Act to make Canadians equal before the law. Formally known as the “Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, 1969,” the idea was to repeal race-based laws and policies that harmed aboriginals by separating them from the rest of Canadian society. The Department of Indian Affairs would be dismantled within five years. Treaties would be respected by giving aboriginals the right to sell their reserve lands, or to privatize reserves into individual or band ownership, such that aboriginals would own the land. The federal government would transfer its constitutional authority over “Indians, and Lands reserved for the Indians” to the provinces. Trudeau’s proposal would obviously take power and control away from local aboriginal leaders.
Sadly, Trudeau’s proposal for racial equality was withdrawn in 1970, after many aboriginal leaders opposed the change.
Fifty-six years later, after literally hundreds of billions of tax dollars have been spent on reserves, the same problems persist: higher rates of unemployment, poverty, drug abuse, alcohol addiction, spousal abuse, family violence, and fetal alcohol syndrome. Race-based rights enshrined in Canadian law, combined with current federal spending of over $40 billion per year, are obviously not helping aboriginals. In inflation-adjusted dollars, federal indigenous spending increased from $10.3 billion in 2014/15 to $40.8 billion in 2024/25. This increase was seven times more than overall federal program spending increases during the same time period. In short, each year the federal government spends roughly $20,000 for each indigenous man, woman and child in Canada, to no avail. It has been argued that much—perhaps most—of this money goes to bureaucrats, lawyers, consultants, academics, and corrupt politicians.
How do indigenous Canadians compare to Canadians of Chinese, Ukrainian, Italian, Punjabi, and other ancestries? Immigrants from around the world were forced to learn English or French when they came to Canada, losing their native tongues in the process. In many cases, immigrants faced severe hardships, including poverty and discrimination. Ukrainian Canadians were detained in labour camps during World War I, and Japanese Canadians suffered the same fate during World War II.
Intergenerational trauma, alcoholism, and family dysfunction affect people of every race and ethnicity. In all cases, immigrants to Canada have suffered at least a partial loss of their language, culture, and traditions. But without race-based laws or race-based federal funding, the children and grandchildren of immigrants do as well as (or better than) other Canadians. Canada’s race-based rights, laws, policies, and government spending are obviously harming the aboriginals who are supposed to be helped.
The “free and democratic society” envisioned by the Charter includes the right of individuals—and groups—to preserve and promote their own language, heritage, religion, and traditions. Parents have every right to teach a second (or even a third or fourth) language to their children, and to transmit a culture to the next generation. When it comes to preserving their languages and their cultures, aboriginals enjoy the same rights and freedoms as all other Canadians. Why, in 2026, does Canada persist with toxic and destructive race-based policies?
Now, 56 years after Trudeau’s proposal was withdrawn, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew has stated (as Trudeau did in 1969) that it’s time to abolish the Indian Act. Drawing attention to his own Indian status card, the premier stated, “I’m not sure if that lines up with your vision of Canada, that we still have a race-based form of identification in this country, but this is a reality.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney reportedly called the Indian Act a racist and anachronistic law that he is open to repealing or reforming.
Unfortunately, current indications suggest that decision-makers may perpetuate race-based laws and policies that treat Aboriginal Canadians differently from other Canadians in any replacement of the act, rather than pursue a vision of equality before the law.
Mr. Carney stated after a meeting with First Nations leaders this week, “At its heart, today’s meeting was about strengthening our relationship, government to government, nation to nation, with First Nations, about how we can move forward together.” The word “nation” conveniently straddles the idea of a country (as in “United Nations”) as well as the idea of an ethnic group united by culture, identity, or history. Canada’s “First Nations” are ethnic groups, not countries. To suggest that Canada’s federal government would negotiate with aboriginals “government to government” suggests that “First Nations” are countries rather than ethnic groups.
Abolishing the Indian Act and other race-based laws and policies can potentially be a good thing for aboriginal Canadians, but not if the act is replaced by similar policies. Aboriginals are as capable of achieving success and prosperity as any other ethnic group in Canada, but that won’t happen until enough Canadians embrace the principle of “equal rights for all, special privileges for none.”
John Carpay is President of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (jccf.ca).
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
