Section 91(24) and Canada's Legislative Jurisdiction with Respect to the Métis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Section 91 (24) of the Constitution Act of 1867 provides that the federal government has the legislative jurisdiction over “Indians and lands reserved for the Indians.” However, the Federal government has consistently held that the Métis fall within the authority of Provincial governments. This has resulted in the anomaly of the Federal government presently claiming jurisdiction for two of the three Aboriginal peoples of Canada—the Indians and the Inuit—while there is a de facto jurisdictional vacuum in respect to the Métis. With the Federal government’s assertion of jurisdiction over Indian and Inuit issues has come the Federal allocation of lands and services to persons of those groups. The Métis in the meantime are mostly left to fend for themselves. While the author is aware of the distinction between legislative jurisdiction and responsibility over Métis affairs, this paper focuses on the former in exploring the matter of Federal jurisdiction over the Métis under section 91(24) of the Constitution Act of 1867. The starting point for this analysis is the Supreme Court decision in Re the term ‘Indians’ which held that examining documents contemporaneous to Confederation is central to a determination of the scope of the term. As such, much of this article focuses on examining contemporaneous material including the British Parliamentary Papers. It is argued that the reports examined show that the term “Indians” was often used in a generic sense including the Métis. This article also looks at pre and post Confederation legislation dealing with Aboriginals and posits that such legislation generally defines “Indians” broadly enough to include most Métis. Additionally, Métis land grants and treaty entitlements are examined, and it is argued that at least some Métis were considered “Indians” for the purposes of accessing rights under a number of treaties. The article reasons that the inclusion of Métis under section 91(24) of the Constitution Act of 1867 is consistent with the approach taken by the Supreme Court in Re the term ‘Indians’ and is consistent with a purposive approach to the constitutional interpretation of s. 91(24) which was to have one central authority responsible for the Aboriginal inhabitants of the Dominion. While the acceptance of Federal jurisdiction over issues pertaining to the Métis is expected to create some complications pertaining to the Métis in Alberta, this article forwards the position that these can and should be overcome in the interest of legal consistency and in the interest of furthering the equity of services and rights available to the Aboriginal peoples of Canada.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.026 | 0.010 |
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".