A bill that would end a rule stripping Indian status from some First Nations descendants has not been taken up by the House of Commons committee reviewing it since May 28, even as MPs returned to Ottawa this week for the fall sitting, the B.C. Civil Liberties Association said in a Sept. 17 statement.
Bill S-2 would eliminate what is known as the second-generation cut-off, a provision in the Indian Act that denies status to a child when both a parent and a grandparent lack status themselves. Indigenous Services Canada traces the registration scheme to the Act’s original 1876 version, with the current cut-off dating to 1985 amendments.
The Senate passed an amended version of the bill unanimously on Dec. 4, 2025, and the House of Commons gave it second reading on Feb. 27, 2026, sending it to the Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs, according to the Parliament of Canada’s LEGISinfo database. The committee has not met on the bill since May 28, more than one full parliamentary sitting period ago, LEGISinfo records show.
Aislin Jackson, policy staff counsel for the BCCLA, said “years of work by those affected and legislators have produced Bill S-2, which would stop the attrition caused by the second-generation cutoff,” and called on Ottawa to pass it promptly now that Parliament is back in session.
The numbers at stake have grown since the bill was first drafted. The original version would have restored status to roughly 3,500 people. The Senate’s amendments, which the House has neither accepted nor rejected, would add about 22,000 people to the Indian register in the first year alone and another 7,000 to 8,000 a year for the following three to four decades, according to figures cited in House debate and reported by APTN News.
All four opposition parties say they back the Senate’s amended version. Conservative MP Billy Morin called it “a unique opportunity to broaden eligibility requirements without First Nations leaders going to court,” APTN reported. NDP MP Lori Idlout pressed the government to act faster, telling the House, “I call on them to use the same pace they did in C-5 to expedite the passage of this bill.”
Indigenous Services Minister Mandy Gull-Masty has signalled the government does not oppose ending the cut-off but wants to shape the change differently than the Senate did. “The question is not how we will do it, but it is when we will do it,” she told the House, adding that any change needs community consensus first.
Advocates say that caution carries a real cost. Mi’kmaw Senator Brian Francis has called the cut-off “a form of genocide,” and Amnesty International estimates close to a third of status Indians currently cannot pass status on to their own children under the existing rule.
The stall lands as Ottawa’s legislative attention is consumed elsewhere, including by the Building Canada Strong Act, the major-projects bill introduced this week that has drawn its own criticism from the Assembly of First Nations over consultation. With the fall sitting expected to run into December, neither the government nor the committee has set a date for Bill S-2’s next hearing, leaving the families most affected waiting on a vote that has already cleared one chamber unanimously.
Via BC Civil Liberties Association. Original reporting: BCCLA.
