Indigenous and Northern Affairs Committee on Feb. 10th, 2026

[The Chair, Liberal, Terry Sheehan]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 20 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs.

We recognize that we meet on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on December 1, 2025, the committee is commencing its study of issues related to the Indian Act registration.

I would like to welcome our witnesses.

We have, from the Department of Indigenous Services, Sacha Senécal, director general and chief data officer. We have Lori Doran, director general, individual affairs. We also have Stuart Hooft, director of registration reform, registration reform and policy, procedures and program management.

You will have five minutes.

[Lori Doran, Director General, Individual Affairs, Department of Indigenous Services]

Thank you very much.

Thank you for the invitation to appear at committee today.

I also wish to acknowledge that we are meeting today on the lands of the Algonquin Anishinabe people.

My name is Lori Doran and I am the director general of the individual affairs branch, services to individuals sector, for Indigenous Services Canada. In my role, I oversee the registration services.

As you said, I am joined today by my colleagues Stuart Hooft, director, registration reform and policy, procedures and program management, and Sacha Senécal, director general and chief data officer for Indigenous Services Canada.

We're pleased to be invited today to kick off this study on subsections 6(1) and 6(2) of the Indian Act, including the second-generation cut-off.

Based on the motion, the committee is also interested in examining the impacts of the unstated paternity policy and the gradual loss of entitlement to registration in some first nations communities while exploring potential solutions that are compliant with article 33 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This article affirms the right of indigenous peoples to self-determine “their own identity and membership in accordance with their customs and traditions.”

While the registration and membership provisions of the Indian Act have been amended a number of times, inequities remain. Bill S-2, currently awaiting second reading in the House of Commons, is the fourth bill since 1985.

The second-generation cut-off refers to the difference between the registration provisions under subsections 6(1) and 6(2) of the Indian Act. A parent entitled to registration or registered under subsection 6(1) can extend entitlement to registration to their children regardless of the other parent's entitlement to registration. A parent entitled to registration or registered under subsection 6(2) may extend that entitlement only if the other parent is also entitled to registration under subsections 6(1) or 6(2).

After two successive generations of parenting with a non-registered person, the third generation is no longer entitled to registration under the Indian Act.

During the 2018-19 collaborative process on Indian registration, band membership and first nations citizenship, the minister's special representative at the time, Claudette Dumont-Smith, reported that a separate and more in-depth consultation is required to determine how best to address the second-generation cut-off. Consultation on this issue is a commitment Canada has made as per action plan measure 2.8 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act. To this end, on November 20, 2023, Indigenous Services Canada launched the collaborative process on the second-generation cut-off and section 10 voting thresholds. This is a consultation process seeking first nations-led solutions to these important issues. This process was designed by and for first nations to ensure a thorough consideration of the options as well as implementation considerations.

This ongoing process was introduced not to consider “whether” to address the second-generation cut-off but rather “how” to remedy this issue. We acknowledge that there is some urgency to this matter and that this process is taking longer than some may want. Solutions received to date from first nations represent a range of potential pathways, including a one-parent rule, first nations jurisdiction over registration and the use of DNA or blood quantum. The department has also developed a process to receive feedback from individuals, as this matter needs to be considered from both the individual and collective perspectives. These solutions will be reviewed very soon by a panel of first nations experts for their legal viability and other impacts before they are packaged into a guide for consultation in a series of first nations-led events to start this spring.

The impact of the second-generation cut-off varies by region, history and first nation across the country. This is why the department has made the total registered subsection 6(2) population of each first nation in Canada publicly available as part of its commitment to information sharing. As of December 31, 2025, 340,839 individuals are registered under subsection 6(2), which represents 29.9% of the total registered population in Canada. The registered population will continue to grow until 2066, even without a solution to the second-generation cut-off, but will decline thereafter. That said, the impact will be different across communities, which underscores the importance of sharing community-level data.

Ancestry and parentage are personal matters. At times, information about parentage may not be known, or knowledge of one's parentage may change over time. In the past, this could pose a barrier in accessing registration and membership, since entitlement to registration is based on a person's ancestry. As a result of Bill S-3 in 2017, and based on the Ontario Court of Appeal's decision in the Gehl case, provisions were added to the Indian Act to clarify that all forms of credible evidence must be considered in cases of unstated paternity and that every reasonable inference should be made in favour of the applicant. Following these changes, the department updated its approach to assessing these files and published new guidance online. It continues to assess requests, escalating the requests directly to the Indian registrar for a decision, if necessary.

Indigenous Services Canada is committed to working collaboratively with rights holders and listening to those impacted to find solutions to the existing challenges and legal limitations of the Indian Act.

We appreciate the opportunity to participate in this study.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Terry Sheehan]

Thank you very much for your presentation.

We will now go to questions and answers. The first round is six minutes for each party, beginning with the Conservatives.

MP Morin, you have the first six minutes.

[Billy Morin, Conservative, Edmonton Northwest, AB]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to our public servants for coming today.

The Auditor General put out a report from last summer on registrations when it came to Indian status. There was a little bit of a failing aspect of that when it came to the department—not a little bit; it was kind of a lot, quite frankly.

Can you cite what the backlog is currently when it comes to registering for Indian status?

[Lori Doran]

Yes. The Auditor General did study the registration program and made seven recommendations, which we have accepted. The backlog has come down significantly since the Auditor General's report. It has come down by 28%.

Stuart, maybe you can put some precision to those numbers.

[Stuart Hooft, Director of Registration Reform, Registration Reform and Policy, Procedures and Program Management, Department of Indigenous Services]

Absolutely.

When we talk about the backlog, we mean applications that took longer than six months to process. Six months is our service standard to process registration applications. In 2025, more than 50% of applications were processed within that service standard, and an additional 42%, so 92% in total, were processed within one year or less, which is much shorter than the numbers cited by the five-year study of the Office of the Auditor General.

Specifically, since the report was published in June 2024, the backlog number has reduced by 28%. As of yesterday, the total number of applications sits at 8,900, which we're continuing to process on a daily basis.

[Billy Morin, Conservative, Edmonton Northwest, AB]

Thank you for that.

What are the specific processes and procedures the department has taken over the last year to get that down? Was there anything unique and new that the department has done?

[Lori Doran]

It's a combination of efforts. We have a stable, well-trained workforce at the moment. We have also put in place a number of efficiency measures just to process applications more efficiently, and some policy changes. We've also done some workload management—for example, moving workload from regional offices to headquarters.

I'll turn to Stuart to maybe explain a bit why processing has increased over the years since the last time the law was changed.

[Stuart Hooft]

As the person responsible for policy, I would like to take credit for some of the efficiencies, but in truth, what happened was that the last time the legislation changed was on August 15, 2019, and what you see, then, is a new set of rules that need to be applied. Officers need to learn them, train on them and get familiar with them, and then that applies to people's ancestry.

Now we're coming up on seven years removed from that. Essentially, over time, people's ancestry gets more straightforward. Once we've researched that original ancestor, all the descendants can be processed more quickly. We're starting to see some of that benefit, with fewer applications taking longer. In short, it's because we're seven years removed from the last legislative changes. Initially, those applications took a long time, and now the average has continued to come down over time.

[Billy Morin, Conservative, Edmonton Northwest, AB]

Did the department, back in 2019—maybe a year prior, seeing that the legislation was going to change—increase the number of staff it had to process these changes?

[Stuart Hooft]

Absolutely. We received funding to implement these changes, and we continue to increase our workforce. Of course, hiring them and then training them takes time, and that's why some of the effects take a while to materialize in terms of productivity.

[Billy Morin, Conservative, Edmonton Northwest, AB]

A bit of a concern for me is training. There is a specific amount of training that's involved with processing applications, and of course a citation here from the Auditor General's report is that:

We...found that [ISC] and Crown-Indigenous...and Northern Affairs...could not provide evidence that any of the officials who made [the] final decision on the non-complex applications in our sample had successfully completed training and the certification examinations at the time they made those decisions.

How do you reassure Canadians and status people that the department has actually done that training at this point and is getting better? How do you even measure that?

[Lori Doran]

We have fully implemented the recommendation of the Auditor General. Every processing officer is trained and receives the authority to process applications from the Indian Registrar only once training has been completed and a degree of certification has been met.

We aren't just putting this in place one time. It will be a requirement over every number of years for staff to recertify. There are safeguards in place in the system used to process applications that a person can have access to only once they've met those training and certification criteria.

[Billy Morin, Conservative, Edmonton Northwest, AB]

How many people are in the department now versus how many were there before 2019, for the specific registry purposes?

[Lori Doran]

I'll have to get back to you with that information.

[The Chair, Liberal, Terry Sheehan]

Thank you.

Jaime, go ahead for six minutes, please.

[Jaime Battiste, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso—Antigonish, NS]

I'm wondering how we got here, in terms of the second-generation cut-off. I look at a lot of different examples all across the world in terms of determining indigeneity and there's no real one-size-fits-all program for anyone. If you look at how the Métis do it, there's no cut-off in the second generation. If I look at the Inuit, there's no cut-off internationally. There doesn't seem to be one way.

Take me back to 1985. How did the federal government determine that a second-generation cut-off was the way to go?

[Lori Doran]

In 1985, the second-generation cut-off rule was introduced during parliamentary debate on Bill C-31. It was introduced as an amendment through that process. I can't elaborate further on those exact discussions—

[Jaime Battiste, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso—Antigonish, NS]

Were there any consultations done with first nations' communities? Was a chiefs' group brought together to say, “Here's how we solve this situation”? Was it just Parliament deciding for first nations communities who could and couldn't be them?

[Lori Doran]

Bill C-31 was introduced to address some specific, sex-based inequities. It was a significant bill to address some of those long-standing, historic, sex-based inequities. During the course of the discussions of the bill, the concept of the second-generation cut-off rule came into the fold and the bill was adopted with that provision.

We are now 40 years past Bill C-31 and we are now seeing the impacts of the second-generation cut-off in real time. It's impacting many people today. We have acknowledged the need to address the second-generation cut-off. It wasn't addressed in prior legislation, in part because the solution to it has not yet been determined. There are different pathways to addressing the second-generation cut-off rule. The minister's special representative concluded that specific consultation on the matter was required. That's exactly what we're doing right now.

[Jaime Battiste, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso—Antigonish, NS]

One of the options available in the Indian Act, section 10, is for first nations to create their own membership codes. This is the possibility to say that this is consistent with UNDRIP and it's the people determining for themselves who the members of their first nations communities are.

Why doesn't the federal government accept and acknowledge those who are on the membership lists created by communities and automatically grant them a status card?

[Lori Doran]

The Indian Act has two pathways for membership: section 10 and section 11. Speaking of Bill C-31 in 1985, section 10 was introduced and this allows first nations to assume full control of their membership based on their own customs, codes and traditions. Section 11 has bands that the Indian Registrar maintains.

There has been an interest in supporting first nations moving to section 10. Many have found that the double majority voting threshold is a barrier to their self-determination in that regard, which is why we're also consulting, in addition to the second-generation cut-off, on remedies to section 10 voting thresholds.

We see those two as interconnected because any solution to the second-generation cut-off will further expand potential membership. The connections may be more distant and that could make a double majority even more difficult without taking another look.

[Jaime Battiste, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso—Antigonish, NS]

What is the double majority?

[Lori Doran]

The double majority is when a majority of the members of the nation come to vote and a majority of those support the section 10 membership code. We've seen this as a really high threshold for nations. As a result, very few have moved from section 11 to section 10 in the last number of years.

[Jaime Battiste, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso—Antigonish, NS]

My last question is about Bill S-2, which went through the Senate, and the Senate decided that to amend this, they would go to a one-parent rule.

Based on your conversations during the consultations with the first nations community, are unilateral decisions from Parliament impacting first nations typically well received?