Canada Seminar

Constitutional Silence, Equalization, and Public Services on Indian Reserves

Andrew Stobo Sniderman, Research Fellow, Canada Program

Chair: Antonia Maioni, William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies and Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, McGill University

Please register here to attend. A light lunch will be available.

Canada’s belated legal reckoning with unequal public services on Indian reserves is only beginning. First, I address a puzzle: even though the problem of deficient services on reserves endured for decades—and in many respects, endures still— Canadian courts have hardly addressed the question of its constitutionality. Second, I highlight the formal exclusion of reserves from the federal equalization program, which is meant to ensure similar levels of services across Canada. I suggest that the curiously neglected Section 36 of the 1982 Constitution Act, which calls for “reasonably comparable services” and “essential public services of reasonable quality to all Canadians,” should inform the conversation about unequal services on reserves.

Andrew Stobo Sniderman is a doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School and Rhodes scholar from Montreal. He is the co-author of the bestselling book, Valley of the Birdtail : An Indian Reserve, a White Town, and the Road to Reconciliation. He has also argued before the Supreme Court of Canada, served as the human rights policy advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and clerked for a judge of South Africa’s Constitutional Court. His academic writing has been published or is forthcoming in the University of Toronto Law Journal, the Canadian Bar Review, the Ottawa Law Review, and the International Journal of Refugee Law.