Off-reserve aboriginals lack full voting rights: report

Janice Tibbetts, Canwest News Service Published: Monday, July 14, 2008
National Post

OTTAWA -- Nine years after off-reserve aboriginals won the constitutional right to vote in band elections, many First Nations still have rules that exclude their outside members from casting ballots, an aboriginal group said in a report released Monday.

The Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, representing off-reserve aboriginals, wants "aboriginal residency" added as a grounds for discrimination in the Canadian Human Rights Act, to give their members a venue of complaint against reserves that are not respecting their rights.

"The right to vote is a fundamental human right," said the federally funded report, which examined written codes on reserves to determine whether they reflect the Charter of Rights and international human rights standards.

"The principle of one person one vote must apply within their electoral framework."

The congress says 79% of Canada's aboriginals live off reserve. Many are at risk of being excluded from voting for their chief and band council because the written codes do not give them the right and in some cases specifically exclude them, says the report.

The codes in question, called custom electoral codes, follow the traditions of the individual First Nation community. The custom codes do not fall under the auspices of the Indian Act, which was amended in 2000 to give off-reserve voting rights to aboriginals, says the study.

The report said that 344 of Canada's 600 reserve communities follow custom codes, and "upon scrutiny, many of the codes revealed fundamental flaws."

About 150,000 aboriginals who live off reserve are affected by custom codes, said the report.

A landmark Supreme Court ruling in 1999 declared it to be a violation of the equality provisions in the Charter of Rights for bands to exclude their off-reserve members from voting in elections.

The report looked at 60 custom codes currently in use and found that "a substantive number of band councils have not made reasonable effort to recognize and guarantee voting rights to their off reserve members."

The congress did not specify the exact number of codes that do not guarantee voting rights. Representatives could not be reached for comment.

The Supreme Court ruling, in the case of a man named John Corbiere of the Batchewana Indian Band in northwestern Ontario, dealt with a reserve governed by the federal Indian Act, so the outcome was not clear for aboriginals whose reserves follow custom codes.

The Canadian Human Rights Act currently contains a controversial exemption for aboriginals, which the federal government is trying to repeal.

The congress says there is a strong case to be made for adding "aboriginal residency" as a grounds for discrimination.

Phil Fontaine, grand chief of the Assembly of First Nations, representing aboriginals on reserves, was unavailable for comment.