Indian Act By-Laws: A Viable Means for First Nations to (Re)Assert Control Over Local Matters Now and Not Later
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Section 81 in the Indian Act, RSC 1985, c I-5, contains a broad range of subject matters over which Band Councils may pass by-laws. To date, this provision has been underutilized by most First Nation governments. One of the main reasons for this relates to the fact that, for over a hundred years, the Indian Act gave the federal government the power to disallow any such by-laws and Canada historically took a narrow view of the expanse of the Section 81 by-law powers and exercised its disallowance power broadly. Recent amendments to the Indian Act, however, have repealed this disallowance power, giving Bands greater freedom to pass by-laws. Nonetheless, the validity of such by-laws will continue to be subject to review by the courts. This paper explores the modern interpretation and constitutional principles that will inform the determination of validity of such by-laws and concludes that such principles mandate that the by-law powers should be interpreted expansively and include First Nation jurisdiction over local matters on reserve, including the provision of essential services. The author argues that First Nations should seriously explore using the Indian Act by-laws in the manner proposed, even though such bylaws have often been denigrated as only a ‘delegated’ and not an inherent form of self-government jurisdiction. This is so because of the slow pace of self-government negotiations and the urgent need for change in the manner in which key essential services are currently provided on First Nations reserves.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".