FIRST READING: Everyone hates the Indian Act. So why does it refuse to die?

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On Monday, following a summit between first ministers and First Nations leaders, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew brandished his Indian status card in front of reporters, called it a “race-based form of identification” and appealed for the end of the law that made such a thing possible.

That would be the Indian Act. Passed into law 150 years ago, it sets out the basic legal frameworks under which First Nations exist in Canada: How band councils are elected, who qualifies as an “Indian,” and why reserve land can’t be sold or traded without Crown approval. Earlier iterations of the Act even barred Status Indians from voting in federal elections or possessing alcohol.

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Framers of the Indian Act at the time were open about its paternalistic goals, agreeing in House of Commons debates that Indians were “like children to a very great extent” who “required a great deal more protection than white men.”

Nowadays, it would be difficult to name a piece of Canadian federal legislation that is more disliked than the Indian Act.

As Kinew demonstrated, it’s widely reviled among the one million or so card-carrying Status Indians who are subject to it.

“The Indian Act marks one of the many direct attacks on our nations including efforts to silence our languages, eliminate our cultures and dispossess us of our lands,” Shawn Atleo, a former head of the Assembly of First Nations, wrote for the National Post in 2012.

The Yellowhead Institute, an Indigenous think tank, called it “colonization’s foundational legislation” in an April essay. “It attacked women and children, identity, and restricted freedom to move, trade, and even socialize,” it read.

It’s also the rare piece of federal policy that is despised with equal fervour by both conservatives and progressives.

The right-leaning Fraser Institute is a longtime Indian Act opponent, framing it as a document that encourages government dependency at the expense of entrepreneurship and self-reliance.

Kinew is an NDPer, and he quoted Karl Marx in his official statement calling for the Indian Act’s end. “Abolish the Indian Act. We have nothing to lose but our chains,” he wrote in a Monday social media post.

And it’s why, for at least a generation, the official line in Ottawa is that the Indian Act is outdated and needs to go.

More than 30 years ago, a Liberal Indian Affairs minister, Ron Irwin, could be heard issuing a pledge to abolish the Indian Act that wouldn’t sound out of place in 2026.

“We are committed to devolving and getting rid of the Indian Act in a morally and pragmatic manner over a number of years,” Irwin told the House in 1994.

As far back as 1983, a House of Commons report called the Indian Act a “mechanism of social control and assimilation.”

But the only reason abolition has never happened is because of disagreement over what comes next.

On the one extreme, Indigenous rights and privileges are phased out entirely.

As one 2017 analysis in the journal Policy Options put it, every First Nation is converted into an “ethnic Indigenous municipality” rather than a “self-determining nation.”

That was basically the thrust of the infamous 1969 White Paper. Proposed by then Indian Affairs Minister Jean Chrétien, it proposed to shred the Indian Act, turn reserves into private property and abolish “Indian Status.”

“The Government does not wish to perpetuate policies which carry with them the seeds of disharmony and disunity … it seeks a partnership to achieve a better goal,” read the preamble to the document, which was officially known as the Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy 1969.

In one of the most widely circulated essays rejecting the proposal, Cree lawyer Harold Cardinal said that while the Indian Act was discriminatory, it was at least “a lever” that would disappear if Indigenous people became just another voter cohort.

“We would rather continue to live in bondage under the inequitable Indian Act than surrender our sacred rights,” wrote Cardinal.

On the other extreme, the Indian Act is scrapped in favour of a latticework of new sovereignty and self-governance rights that could have massive unintended consequences on the workings of the federation.

As one example, it’s occasionally been suggested that the Indian Act be phased out in favour of something akin to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Conservative-appointed Senator Patrick Brazeau suggested as much in 2019.

But just two days before Kinew made his call to abolish the Indian Act, the B.C. Conservatives won a landslide victory in B.C. due in part to public dissatisfaction at UNDRIP having been encoded into B.C. law.

The declaration includes a provision stating that “Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired.”

And in a B.C. court ruling last December, a judge concluded that this effectively gave UNDRIP precedence over every other law in the province. The ruling struck down one of B.C.’s oldest laws, the Mineral Tenure Act, on the grounds that it wasn’t UNDRIP-compliant.

There’s also just the simple fact that the Indian Act entrenches a lot of band council power, not all of whom are open to losing it.

The Constitution Act is considered almost impossible to amend, since it requires the unanimous consent of all 10 provinces. Thus, any renegotiation of its terms invites grievances from all 10.

The Indian Act, by comparison, covers 614 individual band governments.

Wrote Kinew on Monday, “we will, of course, need new legislation that is an interface between the federal government and First Nations. And this MUST be created alongside Chiefs and First Nation governments every step of the way.”

Prime Minister Mark Carney agreed that the Indian Act was racist and outdated, but that “not everybody” agreed with the specifics of Kinew’s proposal.

Ontario’s municipal elections on Tuesday saw the defeat of 89-year-old Gordon A. Krantz, the longest-serving mayor in Canadian history.

Krantz has been mayor of Milton since 1980, and has held the position consistently for the interim 46 years, winning 14 consecutive elections.

And Krantz’s final election was a bit of a blowout; winner George Minakakis got 45 per cent to his 25.4 per cent. Minakakis’s basic electoral pitch was that the town was growing rapidly and needed new leadership. Krantz first won the mayoralty when the population was about 30,000. As of last count, it’s now higher than 160,000.

Before Krantz, the usually cited example for a never-ending Ontario mayoralty was Mississauga’s Hazel McCallion, although she made it just 36 consecutive years before retiring at age 93.

And Ontario does seem to dominate in the category of eternal municipal politicians. With Krantz’s loss, the “longest serving mayor” record now falls to Milt McIver, who won re-election Monday night as mayor of the Municipality of Northern Bruce Peninsula, a position he has held since 1982.

First Reading is a Canadian politics newsletter curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox, sign up here.

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