Substantial federal and provincial reform activity over the past decade has addressed exclusionary and racist sections of land-related legislation and policy, although the Indian Act remains in force, and most reform proceeds by way of opt-out, amendment, or replacement of subsidiary policy rather than repeal. The most significant land-specific legislative reform was the December 2022 enactment of the Framework Agreement on First Nation Land Management Act (FAFNLMA), which repealed and replaced the 1999 First Nations Land Management Act and re-established the 1996 nation-to-nation Framework Agreement on First Nation Land Management as the central authority through which First Nations transition away from 44 lands-related sections of the Indian Act. As of late 2022, 194 First Nations had signed onto the Framework Agreement, with 102 having fully ratified their own land codes by March 2023 and 44 in the process of developing land codes.
On the policy side, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (UNDA) Action Plan, released in June 2023, includes Shared Priority Measure 23 committing Canada to withdraw the 1986 Comprehensive Land Claims Policy and the 1995 Inherent Right Policy and to replace them with a rights-recognition approach. In British Columbia, the predecessor of the federal commitment took the form of the 2019 Recognition and Reconciliation of Rights Policy for Treaty Negotiations in British Columbia, co-developed by Canada, BC, and the First Nations Summit and explicitly grounded in section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 and the UN Declaration. Provincial reforms include British Columbia’s Bill 13, the Land Title and Property Law Amendment Act 2024, which the Province explicitly identified as eliminating “a discriminatory and racist legal barrier” that had required First Nations to use proxies, such as development corporations or societies, to purchase, hold, and register land. The federal Indian Act Amendment and Replacement Act (2014) repealed certain antiquated and outdated clauses of the Indian Act, and ongoing legislative reforms (most recently Bill S-2, introduced May 2025, addressing remaining inequities in the Indian Act registration provisions) continue.