The Search for Consensus: A Legislative History of Bill C-31, 1969–19851

Canada’s 1985 Indian Act amendment, known as Bill C-31, was intended to eliminate discrimination against Indian women by creating a non-discriminatory legal criteria for defining “Indian” under the Act. Before 1985, Indian status under the Indian Act was based on a patrilineal system in which a woman’s status was dependent on her father or husband’s status. Therefore Indian women who married Indian men retained their legal status, whereas Indian women who married non-Indian men lost their legal status and their ability to transmit status to their children. Indian men who married non-Indian women, however, not only retained their status, but also transmitted it to their wives and children. The pre-1985 Indian Act provision that removed status from Indian women who “married out” is known as section 12(1)(b). Many Aboriginal women viewed section 12(1)(b) as a blatant form of discrimination. However, when Aboriginal women’s groups began their long campaign in the early 1970s to pressure the government to amend the Indian Act, Canadians were generally unaware of and uninterested in their plight. But by the early 1980s, the problem of discrimination against Indian women was widely condemned in Canada and no longer considered acceptable in a society that valued equal rights and equal treatment for everyone. This paper examines the legislative history of Bill C-31 and describes the social and political context in which federal Indian Act policy developed during the period from 1969 to 1985. It begins by examining the origins of the debate over Aboriginal women’s rights in Canada in the early 1970s. It then traces the emergence of competing viewpoints within the Aboriginal community on “membership issues”, the evolution of government thinking on Indian Act policy, and the influence of Aboriginal viewpoints on federal policy considerations. It also examines the rationale for Bill C-31 and Aboriginal people’s views of the bill. The primary impetus for Bill C-31 was the creation of an equality provision in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and a United Nation ruling in 1981 in favour of Sandra Lovelace, an Aboriginal woman who had lost her status under

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