The Search for Consensus: A Legislative History of Bill C-31, 1969–19851
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.032 | 0.050 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.018 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".