Bill moves to House of Commons for debate
OTTAWA—In the sterile fluorescence of a Senate committee room, where legislation usually trudges along at a bureaucrat’s pace, history cracked open on November 17, and two women from Manitoulin—one in the gallery, one waiting at home—felt the ground shift beneath them.
When senators voted ten to one to amend Bill S-2 and replace the second-generation cut-off with a one-parent rule for First Nations status, Dr. Dawn Lavell Harvard did what any daughter raised in the long shadow of a half-century legal battle would do: she reached for her phone. The moment the amendments passed, she texted her mother, Jeannette Corbiere Lavell—the same woman who, in 1971, dared to take the federal government to court after Canada erased her status for the “crime” of marrying a non-status man.
Fifty-four years later, her daughter sat in the Senate chamber watching the country inch—reluctantly, unevenly—toward undoing the very harm that had defined her family’s life.
“When someone asked me, ‘What, are we supposed to have First Nations people in perpetuity?’ my answer was ‘yes’,” Dr. Lavell Harvard said. “If we don’t support a one-parent rule, we are effectively saying we believe our people and our cultures should be legally genocided. Canadians have built a country on a one-parent rule. Why shouldn’t we?”
A Fight Born on Manitoulin
The story of Bill S-2 might be unfolding in Ottawa’s committee rooms, but its heartbeat remains firmly on Manitoulin Island, where the modern legal fight against sex discrimination in the Indian Act first ignited.
Ms. Corbiere Lavell’s challenge to section 12(1)(b) was the first crack in the fortress of legislative disenfranchisement—a regime designed to shrink First Nations populations through a maze of rules: “marrying out,” enfranchisement, deregistration, university degrees, and finally, the second-generation cut-off. She lost at the Supreme Court by one vote in 1973. Canada’s message back then was clear: First Nations women who married non-status men were expendable; their children, even more so.
But she didn’t stop. And neither did the generation raised in her wake.
Dr. Lavell Harvard, who jokes she grew up believing every family spent weekends at protests instead of hockey arenas, said activism wasn’t a choice so much as inheritance. “I was a hopeless skater anyway,” she told The Expositor. “This work is in my bones. It’s been my mom, my childhood, my whole life, to fight for our people,” she said over the phone, in a voice that seemed to be smiling.
Why Bill S-2 Matters Now
Bill S-2, reintroduced after its predecessor Bill C-38 died on the order paper, was drafted to address inequities in registration and band membership, particularly for those affected by enfranchisement. It responds to the Nicholas litigation before the B.C. Supreme Court, which has given Parliament until April 2026 to fix the problem.
But many witnesses—including the Assembly of First Nations, regional organizations, the Indian Act Sex Discrimination Working Group, and nearly every expert who appeared before the committee—argued the bill didn’t go far enough. The second-generation cut-off, they said, is not just discriminatory; it’s a slow-moving erasure of First Nations as federally recognized peoples.
“All but two witnesses called for its immediate end,” Mi’kmaw Senator Paul Prosper, who introduced the amendments, reminded the chamber. “We cannot govern who First Nations fall in love with.”
Dr. Lavell Harvard was more blunt when speaking with us. “Even some of our own people are pushing back with silly arguments about blue-eyed kids running around on reserves. Who cares? The last time people were so concerned with eye colour and purity was Hitler. Do we really want to become what has oppressed us?”
She went on to dismantle the idea that recognizing First Nations children would drain community resources. “Those babies are already here,” she said. “If we deny them status, we create a bigger burden, because then we receive no support for them. More status members means more funding, more political will, more power. Saying otherwise is pure colonial scarcity mindset.”
Indigenous Services Canada published community specific data sheets detailing the impact of the second-generation cut-off on First Nations registered populations. The Expositor is currently reviewing the data for publication as this story progresses but it appears that Dr. Lavell Harvard is correct, if the second generation cut off isn’t abolished most First Nations, particularly smaller communities will be extinct in just a few generations. For peoples whose teachings rely heavily on making decisions for the next seven generations, this would be catastrophic.
“The part that really struck me was their projection. They said this change would create about 300,000 new status Indians over the next 40 years. Sounds huge, right? But when you break it down across all First Nations, and you account for elders passing on, it works out to maybe 10 or 12 people per Nation. We’re not talking about some great migration of strangers returning to communities.
“And let’s be honest: people already on band lists, people living off-reserve with their kids—whether they move home has nothing to do with whether their grandchildren have status. It depends on housing, on jobs, on whether they can actually make a life there.
“There’s this persistent myth that whole crowds of unknown people are going to show up if we fix the registration rules. But when you do the math, it just isn’t true. We’re talking about our own kids and grandkids—people born after 1985, the generation that started having children around 2000 and onward. These aren’t strangers. These are our families. That’s the part I can’t wrap my head around—that anyone could imagine otherwise.”
A Mother’s Tears, a Daughter’s Trembling Voice
At home, Jeannette Corbiere Lavell wept when her daughter told her the amendments had passed the committee stage. Not the soft tears of polite relief—these were the deep, shaking sobs of someone who has carried the weight of a nation’s daughters on her shoulders for more than five decades.
Those tears were earned. They were for the generations of women who “married out,” for the children pushed off the Indian Register, for the families split across legal categories—6(1), 6(2), none at all. They were for the legal extinction formula that, if left untouched, would eventually erase entire First Nations under federal law.
And they were for the thousands who may now find their rights restored—not because Canada finally found its conscience, but because First Nations women refused to surrender.
Not a Victory Yet
Despite the vote, nothing is guaranteed. The amendments must still survive the Senate’s report stage, third reading, and then three readings in the House of Commons—where the government, led by Indigenous Services Minister Mandy Gull-Masty, has been cautioning against moving too quickly.
Minister Gull-Masty has argued that expanding the bill without extensive consultation could violate the Crown’s constitutional obligations. But Senator Michèle Audette countered that the system has delayed justice long enough. “The system is not on our side,” she told APTN. “But today, we have an opportunity.”
Even Senator Audette predicts the House may strip the amendments. If that happens, she warned, the community must speak loudly and clearly.
Dr. Lavell Harvard echoed that call. “You have two choices,” she told senators. “Either you say yes to a one-parent rule and yes to ending the second-generation cut-off, or you say yes to the extinction of First Nations people.”
‘No More’
Perhaps the most poignant response came from Ms. Corbiere Lavell herself:
“Miigwetch to all the Senators who voted to remove the second generation cut-off. And on behalf of all the young people who, like myself 54 years ago, are being told they don’t belong—we all say, ‘No more.’”
For a mother and daughter who have spent their entire lives resisting a system designed to shrink their people out of legal existence, this moment—fragile, uncertain, but finally within reach—felt like history trying, at last, to bend.
And for Manitoulin Island, where this fight began, it is proof that even the smallest places can reshape the laws of a country—when the right women refuse to let the story end.
