Donna Kennedy-Glans: Paternalistic Indian Act should have been abolished long ago - National Post
Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew shown holding up his Indian identity card at a news conference Monday October 26, 2026. Photo by Wab Kinew/XArticle contentI’m a lawyer. And I’ve been watching Canadian governments talk about ending the Indian Act for most of my adult life.
In 1969, Trudeau and Chrétien actually tried it. Their white paper proposed scrapping the statute, ending separate legal status and treating First Nations people as ordinary Canadians. Indigenous leaders called it assimilation and killed it; the paternalistic act stayed.
Last week in Ottawa, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew held up his own status card and said the same thing. The Indian Act is a race-based form of identification that has no place in a modern country. Abolishing it is overdue; keep the treaties and Section 35 rights, but drop the paternalism. Prime Minister Mark Carney called the act racist, anachronistic and said he is open to reforming or abolishing it — with First Nations, of course.
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That sounds like progress. Then you look at what actually happened in British Columbia.
In September 2025, the Eby government, the federal government and the Haida Nation went to B.C. Supreme Court and asked Justice Christopher Giaschi to declare that the Haida hold Aboriginal title to the terrestrial areas of Haida Gwaii under Section 35(1) of the Constitution. This was not the end of a long trial; it was a consent order. The NDP had already recognized title by agreement and legislation; they wanted the court to lock it in so a future government could not undo it.
B.C.’s lawyer, Brent Olthuis, put it plainly: “If the legislature makes a law, it can unmake a law.”
The Haida lawyer, David Paterson, was more direct: “There are agreements in place, but agreements can be revoked. There is provincial legislation in place, but legislation can be repealed.”
