Good afternoon. Thank you.
My name is Nicole Dufour. I am the secretary of the aboriginal law committee of the Barreau du Québec. First,I would like to apologize for the absence of the president, who unfortunately could not get away to be with us.
I'm going to make the general comments and my colleague, Ms. Dupuis, who is chair of the aboriginal law committee and who has done a lot of work in aboriginal law, will make the specific comments. In view of the time frame we were given yesterday, we were late in sending our comments. I will give you a few passages.
The bill is intended as a response to the Court of Appeal for British Columbia decision, rendered in April 2009, in the McIvor case. The Court of Appeal held that paragraphs 6(1)(a) and (c) violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and cannot be justified under section 1 of the Charter because the amendments made to the Indian Act in 1985 do not minimally impair the applicants' rights in that they served to widen the existing inequality between the applicants' group and members of the comparator group. Those amendments not only maintained the existing rights of a class of persons, they in fact improved their status as of April 17, 1985—