Still Crazy after All These Years: Section 88 of the Indian Act at Fifty
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Section 88 of the Indian Act which provides, as a matter of federal law, for the application of much provincial law to Indians, is fifty years old this year: an apt time to review what we know of its origins and to reflect on the impact it has had on the Canadian law of Aboriginal peoples. This article attempts just such an assessment. As it turns out, we know very little about the reasons for s. 88 's enactment; when introduced, it attracted almost no scrutiny from the public, in Parliament, or even at Cabinet. In the years since, we have paid dearly for that inattention. By happenstance, it has managed to fulfill its original mandate to protect Aboriginal peoples' treaty rights from the impact of standards enacted provincially. In almost every other respect, however, s. 88 has given rise to confusion and to controversy, frustrating courts' efforts to apply it coherently, thwarting Aboriginal peoples' (and others') attempts to tell what mainstream law prescribes, and complicating otherwise routine tasks of enforcement and administration. It is, for these reasons, a provision overdue for reconsideration.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".