It is not often that the name of a department grabs the headlines in a cabinet shuffle, but that’s what happened when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced he was cleaving Indian and Northern Affairs Canada into two separate entities. The move comes two decades after the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples made this recommendation in 1996.
In a recent Policy Options article, Queen’s University PhD student Veldon Coburn takes a look at whether splitting up the department still makes sense, and whether it will actually move the government toward decolonization. He joined the podcast to discuss the important context around the announcement.
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This article is part of the special feature The Indian Act: Breaking Its Stubborn Grip.
Photo: By Jeangagnon (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons