Canada’s shame: 150 years of forced assimilation

Over the last 40 years, the courts and UN bodies have told Canada many times that the sex, race, and family status discrimination in the Indian Act must be removed completely. In spite of this, the government may well refuse to support Bill S-2 as amended.

The Caldwell First Nation holds a demonstration on Parliament Hill on June 11, 2026. Indian Act sex discrimination has been a strategy of Canada’s colonial government to reduce the population of recognized ‘Indians,’ by defining them into the non-Indigenous population, write Shelagh Day and Mary Eberts.Photograph courtesy of Akshay Grover

Opinion

BY SHELAGH DAY, MARY EBERTS

June 17, 2026

On the human rights front, Canada is guilty of what Prime Minister Mark Carney called out at Davos: rhetoric, not reality. We may have a sign in our window that says ‘we believe in human rights,’ but the reality is we do not act to make those rights real.

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