Ottawa has gone to Federal Court for the third time in just over a year in its long-running dispute with First Nations advocates over child welfare, this time trying to overturn a human rights tribunal’s refusal to reshuffle the panel hearing the case.
The federal government filed an application Sept. 18, 2026, asking a judge to quash an Aug. 18 ruling from the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal that rejected Ottawa’s request to reconstitute the three-member panel overseeing the nearly two-decade-old case, according to CBC News. Indigenous Services Canada argues the panel is now “inquorate,” since only one of its original members remains active.
The panel first sat in 2012. One member died in 2015, leaving two to issue the landmark January 2016 decision that found Canada racially discriminated against First Nations children by chronically underfunding on-reserve child and family services. One of those two remaining members resigned in July 2026, and the government asked the tribunal on July 28 to rebuild the panel, arguing it needed a full bench to keep the public’s confidence in its rulings. Tribunal chair Jennifer Khurana dismissed that request, with full reasons to follow later.
Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society and a co-complainant in the case since it was filed in February 2007, said the government’s own compliance claims sit awkwardly next to its choice to keep going to court. “The minister claims to be complying with tribunal orders so why would they bring this judicial review to try to interfere?” she told CBC News, adding Ottawa’s litigation posture under the current government has become “much more aggressive” than under past ones. Indigenous Services Canada spokesperson Carolane Gratton called the filing “protective” and said it isn’t meant to delay any tribunal proceedings.
That reassurance will be a hard sell to the Caring Society, the Assembly of First Nations, Chiefs of Ontario and Nishnawbe Aski Nation, all of which opposed reshuffling the panel on the grounds that it would stall a reform process that still hasn’t resolved Jordan’s Principle compensation claims for individual children.
What’s missing from most coverage of this filing is what it’s costing taxpayers to keep the fight going. Justice Department figures obtained under access-to-information legislation show Canada spent about $14.5 million over 18 years, from 2006 to 2024, on the roughly 19 legal files tied to fighting the Caring Society and Blackstock specifically, close to $800,000 a year on average. Blackstock has called that figure an undercount, pointing to more than 30 tribunal orders issued against Canada over the same span. None of that total includes this year’s three new Federal Court filings, meaning the bill is still climbing even as Ottawa separately negotiates a broader child welfare reform package that First Nations chiefs rejected in 2024 when it was worth $47.8 billion, and that a smaller, $8.5-billion Ontario version is still tied up in its own court challenge.
The underlying discrimination finding from 2016 isn’t in dispute. What’s being litigated now is procedure, whether one human rights adjudicator can keep making decisions on a file that affects tens of thousands of First Nations children, many of them born after the complaint was first filed. Blackstock says every court challenge, protective or not, pushes that timeline further out. Ottawa’s own department says none of this changes anything on the ground. First Nations families waiting on Jordan’s Principle claims will find out which is true as the case, and the government’s third try at the Federal Court, plays out.
Via CBC News. Read the original report: cbc.ca
