When the metaphorical elbows come up, Americans won’t be the only ones taking blows from Canadian fists. 

That sentiment has recently been shared by Indigenous and public sector labour leaders alike as they responded to Prime Minister Carney’s Budget 2025. The budget seeks to address Canada’s current economic challenges and external threats by increasing capital investments in revenue-generating enterprises such as infrastructure, resource development, and military defence, while decreasing spending on government operations, and importantly, Indigenous affairs. Budget 2025 advances an operational budget reduction exercise that will reduce the federal workforce by 4.5%, or 40,000 workers, within three years. Additionally, Budget 2025 proposes reductions to the budgets of both Indigenous Services Canada (ISC) and Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (CIRNAC) by 2% — or $2.3 billion — by 2030. 

National Indigenous Organizations such as the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK), and the National Association of Friendship Centres (NAFC) have expressed their collective concerns with the budget reductions and the negative impacts they will have on their respective communities. Major labour unions representing public sector employees have voiced similar concerns and have called instead for a strengthening of the public sector as a response to internal and external challenges to Canada. The argument is that a thriving Canada requires a strong public service. Of course, labour unions have also expressed deep concerns with the real-life economic impacts of layoffs, early retirement, and the influence of artificial intelligence on labour in general. Notably, Indigenous employees make up 5.3% of the public sector, meaning any government reductions may also negatively impact Indigenous economic life. 

That said, missing from the conversation on the strengthening of the public sector is the role of ISC and CIRNAC in the colonial control of Indigenous peoples in Canada. Is cutting the “Indian Departments” really such a bad thing? A renewed conversation on abolishing these departments is past due — and it should include organized labour. 

ISC and CIRNAC Just Won’t Go Away

The current iteration of the “Indian Departments” in Canada emerged from an early Trudeau era split of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) into two distinct departments that today comprise ISC and CIRNAC. In 2017, the split was endorsed by the AFN and believed to represent a shift in the relationship between the federal government and Indigenous peoples. CIRNAC was to handle the more political aspect of the Indigenous-Canada relationship, while ISC dealt with the provision of essential services and programs. At the time, the split was touted as a move to eventually work towards the devolution of jurisdiction over governance, programs, and services to Indigenous governments, a move well described as “Coercive Fiscal Federalism” by Algonquin Anishinaabe professor Veldon Coburn. 

Devolution is further mandated by CIRNAC’s enabling of “Indigenous peoples to build capacity and support their vision of self-determination” and for ISC, its “supporting Indigenous peoples in assuming control of the delivery of services at the pace and in the ways they choose.” Despite these gestures of devolution, since 2021, ISC’s employment numbers have grown by roughly 6.5% year-over-year to a current 8,619 employees, with CIRNAC seeing a reduction from 2,072 employees in 2021 to 1,892 today. Since 2021, both departments have collectively spent $1.95 billion on administrative costs for their programs and services. In that same time period, both departments have seen a 13% increase to their total internal spending. Taken together, both departments have increased their average internal spending by 4.15% each fiscal year since 2021. Even with CIRNAC’s slight employee reduction, internal expenses still increased. Given the size, scope, and collective growth of the “Indian Departments,” we should expect some significant movement on the transfer of authority and jurisdiction over services to Indigenous governments. 

Unfortunately, the current record proves otherwise.  

The Indian Department’s Track Record:
Failing Upward  

A recent report from the federal Auditor General has affirmed what Indigenous leaders, governments, organizations, and communities already know — that ISC is failing Indigenous communities. The report highlights how, despite having received an 84% increase in funding between 2019 and 2024, ISC has failed to satisfactorily implement a majority of the Auditor General’s recommendations. Specifically, of the 34 recommendations made since 2015, ISC has demonstrated unsatisfactory implementation of 18. This lack of progress speaks directly to failures in Indigenous communities related to ending boil-water advisories, enhancing emergency capacities, and increasing health service access.

Of the multiple structural issues identified by the Auditor General, the lack of capacity-building to support an eventual transfer of control over services, in addition to bureaucratic red tape and a siloed approach, stands out.

ISC’s counterpart, CIRNAC, displays similar levels of inefficiency and a reluctance to abandon the paternalistic attitude of its predecessor. Of significance are CIRNAC’s “rights-based negotiations,” where Canada has sought to move past the flawed comprehensive claims process towards a negotiated Recognition of Indigenous Rights and Self-Determination (RIRSD). Early opposition from the AFN and Indigenous scholars alike critiqued the negotiation tables and their associated Indigenous Rights Framework as undermining expressions of Indigenous self-determination, limiting those expressions to fit within the narrow scope of the Canadian constitution, and pursuing the extinguishment of Indigenous rights. 

Despite the opposition, CIRNAC has continued with these negotiation tables and is currently in 173 active negotiations with Indigenous governments. The department claims that these negotiations have resulted in 55 concluded agreements. Upon review, CIRNAC seems to be overplaying the significance of many of these agreements and its role in negotiating them. Some agreements have resulted in some form of limited self-government, such as those between Canada and the Métis Nation of Alberta, the Métis Nation-Saskatchewan, and the controversial Métis Nation of Ontario. Other agreements are identified as memorandums of understanding to engage in further dialogue, the issuance of apologies for historic grievances, or the conclusion of court-ordered settlements. 

These negotiation tables have resolved very little in the conflicts over Indigenous rights and title in this country, which is made evident by the fact that Indigenous Nations are still opting to pursue litigation over negotiation, such as in the case of the historic Robinson-Huron Treaty Annuities, the recent Cowichan Title ruling, and Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg’s recent title claims for large swaths of land in western Quebec. 

Like ISC, CIRNAC also has difficulty letting go of control over Indigenous Peoples. Despite having a mandate to support Indigenous Peoples’ right to self-determination, current progress reports indicate little progress on this front. Since 2022, CIRNAC has increased the percentage of First Nations’ jurisdiction over their fiscal management by 6.8% and over their land management by 2.4%. To this day, a little over half of First Nations have jurisdiction over their fiscal management, and roughly 20% have jurisdiction over their land management. Additionally, since 2023, CIRNAC has shown a whopping improvement of 1.9% (from 10% to 11.9%) of “Indigenous groups that have enhanced their governance capacity.” 

A Brief History of Colonial Administration 

One could attribute ISC and CIRNAC’s shortcomings to the nature of administrative bureaucracies: too slow, too siloed, and too risk-averse. We could then consider how to create more responsive, responsible, innovative, and efficient departments (even though, as mentioned above, Trudeau attempted it between 2019 and 2020). But that approach would not account for the possibility that, as administrators of colonialism, these two departments are operating exactly as intended.

ISC and CIRNAC are creatures of colonial-era legislation; they belong to a bureaucratic lineage deeply rooted in the control of Indigenous Peoples and the dispossession of their lands. 

This administrative lineage predates Canada and the Indian Act and can trace its roots to the Bagot Commission (1842–1844). This early commission sought to downgrade the nation-to-nation relationship between Indigenous people and the Crown, from one based on military allyship to an administrative relationship governed by regulatory mechanisms and bureaucratic institutions. The commission recommended and launched what would become the complete bureaucratization of Indigenous Peoples. Rooted in paternalism, it began with the cataloguing of Indigenous Peoples (as “Indians”) and the surveying of Indigenous lands for reserve-based settlement and management. 

These early administrative shifts in the Crown-Indigenous relationship would culminate in the Indian Act and the emergence of a permanent administrative “Indian Department.” This department has seen various iterations over time, but it has always administered colonialism on Canada’s behalf — whether that be overseeing the residential school system, monitoring the workplans and deliverables of Indian Agents, or ensuring that cede and surrender clauses are present in all comprehensive and specific claim agreements. 

To accomplish colonialism’s dirty work, administrators needed to intimately know Indigenous Peoples to enforce their own authority and construct a system of complete dependence. This was — and is — achieved by positioning these departments as the (often only) granters of Indigenous funding and resources, creating complex and unclear bureaucratic processes to receive funds, and placing extensive reporting burdens on Indigenous communities (see Cash Back). Combine this with the complete control to arbitrate who is Indigenous and which organizations may or may not represent Indigenous Peoples through the allocation of organizational funding and recognition; the result is an administrative apparatus that assumes total control over Indigenous Peoples by virtue of administration.

Progressive Labour, Abolishment
& Collective Liberation

The current 2% federal budget reduction is not a decolonial effort to dismantle the “Indian Departments” and transfer authority to Indigenous governments; Indigenous communities dealing with chronic underfunding and corresponding socio-economic hardships will feel the impact of Canada’s budget reduction experiments.

The strengthening of Indigenous communities does not rely on a strong Canadian public service. In fact, the historical and contemporary record proves the opposite. Indigenous self-determination requires a complete transfer of jurisdiction and authority to Indigenous Peoples, which, if realized, would mean a dismantled — or significantly reduced — Canadian public service. This is often left out of the calls for a strengthened public sector by labour movements in Canada. 

If, for labour movements, the eventual goal is the advancement of equity, human rights, and protection of workers from exploitation, then that work cannot be premised on the administration and survival of colonialism through its administrative apparatus. 

Progressive labour in Canada will need to recognize that a decolonial future includes a full reduction, if not eradication, of the public sector that administers and controls Indigenous lives and roadblocks Indigenous self-determination and liberation. A similar debate emerged around the role of law enforcement in the labour movement in recent years, with the fundamental tension being between building solidarity with all workers and the reality that police are the armed representatives of the state, often working against the interests of the working class. Just as the Canadian Labour Congress supported efforts to defund the police and workers fought within their unions to keep police out, Canada’s unions must support the dissolution of the Indian Departments and the transfer of control and jurisdiction back to Indigenous nations. Public sector labour movements that tout the importance of reconciliation and self-determination must also recognize the unique role of the Canadian public sector in the administration of colonialism — a uniqueness that emerges from departments mandated to control the lives of specific racialized groups of people at the expense of their liberation. This is a call to progressive labour movements in Canada to recognize and respond to this uniqueness: not all work is good work, and the labour of colonialism is a labour we should seek to abolish, not strengthen.