Watchdog warns revised Indian Act will be costlier
Liberals had capitulated to Senate demands
• After Liberals caved to Senate demands on an update to the Indian Act, the Parliamentary Budget Officer says the revised bill will cost more than seven times as much.
On Monday, the government gave its final approval to Bill S- 3. After more than a year of pressure from senators, Liberals amended it from its original version to broaden Indian Status eligibility to all Indigenous people affected by genderbased discrimination.
The bill, ready for royal assent, now goes beyond the bare- bone requirements of a Quebec court that ordered the legislation more than two years ago. This lets the government narrowly meet a Christmas- time deadline when courts would’ve struck part of existing law, making the entire status registration system inoperable.
A bill that completely eliminates sex- based discrimination about who is eligible for status could come at a cost of $ 407 million every year, the PBO predicted in a report released Tuesday morning, compared to a $ 55- million ongoing cost based on the original wording. Initial administrative costs of $ 71 million, over about five years, are now expected, rather than $ 19 million.
Jean- Denis Fréchette costed the bill after a request from independent senator Marilou McPhedran and Liberal MP Robert-Falcon Ouellette, both of whom advocated for the expanded version. In the report, Fréchette puts the new reality simply: the final version of the bill, “would effectively extend eligibility for registration to all persons with First Nations ancestry.”
In proposing the government’s solution to the Senate last month, a move that broke a months- long deadlock between the houses, the government’s representative Sen. Peter Harder explained new clauses wouldn’t immediately take effect: instead, a consultation period would begin early next year to determine exactly how to unroll the new policy.
Some, including Indigenous senator Patrick Brazeau, worried this meant the government could put off changes indefinitely. But others, including Lillian Dyck, an Indigenous senator and the head of the committee that originally took issue with Bill S- 3, said the wording being set into law means no clawbacks will be possible in the future.
A New Democrat amendment to impose an 18-month deadline on that effort was rejected by the House Monday.
Fréchette’s costing puts ballpark figures on the number of people expected to register as status Indians after the new law comes into effect. With the original version of Bill S- 3, about 90 per cent of a pool of 28,000 to 35,000 people were expected to register. Whenever the expanded clauses come into effect, there could be up to 670,000 more eligible people, of which about 270,000 or 40 per cent are expected to actually register.
It is on these numbers, expectations that most people will not move back to reserves, and the average cost of benefits per person, per year, that Fréchette based his analysis. The estimates are subject to “a high degree of uncertainty due to a lack of evidence regarding registration rates, administration plans and long- term migration patterns,” the report says. “The full annual costs will not be realized until eligible persons are registered, which will take many years.”
During House debate about the new revisions to Bill S- 3, Kevin Lamoureux, a parliamentary secretary to the House leader, lauded how the legislation will fix all known gender inequities in the Indian Act — and included his compliments to “feminist prime minister” Justin Trudeau. “It is hard to imagine how we could justify these inequities. We know we could never justify it in 2017,” he said.
But the Liberals didn’t originally intend to go as far. It took well over a year, two deadline extensions sought in court and several stalemates with the Senate before government legislators agreed with longtime Indigenous advocates and senators.
Ouellette spoke in Cree about the final version of Bill S-3 in the House last week. “I am very proud of the stance our government is taking. Even though some may say it is not enough, it is certainly a step in the right direction,” he said, according to a translation. “Maybe it is not just one step; maybe it is a giant leap.”