Family Homes on Reserves and Matrimonial Interests and Rights Act: A Constitutional Division of Powers Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2013, the Canadian federal government enacted the Family Homes on Reserves and Matrimonial Interests and Rights Act. The Act contains interim provisions of a comprehensive nature regarding family law as it applies to interests or rights in the family home particularly when there has been a breakdown of a conjugal relationship. These provisions constitute a complete code until such time as a First Nation develops its own Code as per the enabling/recognition provisions of the Act. Once a First Nation’s Code (hereinafter “FNM Code”) is enacted by, that First Nation Code will govern the subject matter thereby ousting the provisions contained in the Act to the extent the First Nation has decided to deal with the matter directly. This paper will examine the potential reach of provincial family law on First Nation reserves which has had limited application due to the fact that the federal government has exclusive jurisdiction under the Constitution to deal with “Indians and lands reserved for Indians”. This issue will be examined in light of recent division of powers cases promoting cooperative federalism generally and those that have explicitly extended this trend to the interpretation of s. 91(24). The effect of this trend raises important questions regarding the application of provincial family law matters notwithstanding the comprehensive nature of the FMA. Of particular interest is whether the dicta regarding the non applicability of the doctrine of interjurisdictional immunity to Aboriginal rights claims in the recent Tsihqot’in land claims case and to Aboriginal treaties in the recent Grassy Narrows case extends to provincial family law matters. If so, the application of the doctrine of interjurisdictional immunity in regards to First Nation reserve land interests and family law matters may now be suspect. Somewhat related to the division of powers issue is the significance of recognizing First Nation authority to enact their own codes. From a constitutional perspective, what is the significance of such recognition? If inherent authority is recognized by the Act is not such recognition then inconsistent with the view that the powers are delegated powers of the federal government to First Nation bands? We know that interlegislative delegation is not constitutionally possible in Canada. Although not the focus of this paper, these and other related questions and issues are explored in a preliminary way.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".