QUESTION PERIOD — Ministry of Justice
Enforcement of First Nations Bylaws
November 19, 2025
Hello, again, minister. I first want to applaud Senator Mary Jane McCallum, who is sponsoring two bills aimed at ensuring that First Nations bylaws are properly enforced. One bill targets the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Act, but the other targets the Public Prosecutions Act.
As I’m sure you are aware, bylaw enforcement is not just about ensuring that police services enforce bylaws but also that prosecutors follow through with prosecutions.
Minister, given that the law recognizes that First Nations bylaws have the full effect in law as any law passed by Parliament does, will your government commit to ensuring that bylaws are properly enforced and prosecuted?
Thank you. If you’ll allow me, before I arrived in politics, if you’d asked me what the greatest policy success was that I was personally aware of, it actually would have been the changes to the education system in Nova Scotia when it came to handing over the keys to education to Mi’kmaw Kina’matnewey, which has seen a remarkable increase in the graduation rates of Mi’kmaq students in my home province from below 40% to now over 94% — higher than the national average.
The key feature that made it a success was actually putting in charge the people who knew the issues best. I’m actually a big believer that we can do meaningful work to improve the enforcement of bylaws that were adopted by Indigenous governments but an embracing of Indigenous legal systems as well.
I don’t want to do this in a way that is not fully thought through. I want to have the benefit of engagement on this very specific issue, including through the advisory council that we’ve established to help guide the work of the implementation of the UN Declaration, but also the work that we’re doing to advance and implement the Indigenous Justice Strategy, which deals not only with the bylaws that you mentioned but also with Indigenous legal systems.
This is meaningful work. It will take engagement with rights holders, importantly, if we are going to understand how to do this the right way. I’m very interested in this file, and I want to ensure that we actually embrace the laws that are being adopted by the people who know their communities best.
Thank you, minister. I should tell you that every community I visited on my tour throughout Mi’kma’ki raised the issue of bylaw enforcement as a main priority. What is your department doing to ensure that bylaws are respected and properly prosecuted?
To be completely candid, the conversation is earlier in its implementation than I would like it to be. Frankly, I wish this conversation could have been carried out over the course of the past almost 160 years in Canada. Sadly, it has only captured the attention of federal policy-makers in the last few years. There may be some exceptions to that blanket statement, but certainly at a Government of Canada level, you’re hearing a more fulsome engagement with this issue.
Concretely, as we go through the listed priorities from within the Indigenous Justice Strategy, we are seeking to adopt a framework through which we can engage rights-holders to better implement the bylaws that they are actually putting forward.
