I think it was back in 2017 and 2019 that there were amendments made to the Indian Act to remove the historical systemic discrimination that existed. In particular, if women married outside of their community, they would lose their Indian status, and their children would also. There were legislative changes made that rectified that. Individuals then had to apply.
What that caused was an increase in applications. The period we looked at was between 2019 and 2024. In that time frame, there were 140,000 requests for registration that were looked at, which was an increase over previous years, for sure. Those priority cases—if that's what you want to call them, because they were sort of righting past wrongs—were not treated any differently from all the other requests for registration. Some of them are sitting in the backlog. Many of them waited 16 months, on average, to receive a decision.
Really, regardless of what your situation is, that is too long a period of time to be waiting to hear about your status.