A File · Indigenous Policy · Canada
The objective never changed. Only the costume.
The public argument keeps changing clothes. In 1969 it wore equality. In 2015 it wore compassion. In 2026 it wears public safety. Underneath, the sentence is the same one Canada has been administering since the Indian Act: end the distinct collective, remove the people, extinguish the title. This file follows that sentence through the office that has carried it, decade by decade, in the state's own words.
The door in
On July 22, 2026, Scott Gilmore became Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Mark Carney, the most senior political-staff post in the Prime Minister's Office. He had joined Carney's office in March 2025 as senior adviser on foreign, defence and security policy.
Ten years earlier, Gilmore had written in Maclean's that the way to end the violence in Canada's remote Indigenous communities was to help the people leave them, forever — and that failing that, the least Canada could do was send a backhoe as they kept digging graves.
The line is authentically his. It is not a fringe opinion held at a distance from power. It is the reasoning of the person now sitting at the top of the office that sets the Prime Minister's agenda. That is not a scandal about a bad tweet. It is a window onto a policy that has been running, under changing names, for a very long time.
The spine — one office, nine stations
1876
Sold as protection and civilization
The Indian Act becomes federal law. Its purpose, stated openly at the time, is to manage Indigenous peoples toward disappearance as distinct nations: to "civilize," enfranchise, and absorb. Every later reform argues about the method. The objective is set here.
The policy analyst Russ Diabo, a Mohawk of Kahnawà:ke, puts it flatly: the federal objectives of assimilation and termination "have been central to the Indian Act since it became federal law in 1876, and these objectives remain very much alive in Canada today."
Source: Russ Diabo, Georgia Straight, Aug 7 2021
1969
Sold as equality
The Trudeau government's Statement on Indian Policy proposes to end the separate legal status of "Indians" entirely: repeal the Indian Act, wind down the treaties, dissolve the reserve land base, and fold Indigenous people into the citizenry as individuals. It is framed as the removal of discrimination.
Diabo lists its objectives verbatim as the template everything after it inherits:
Assimilate First Nations. Remove legislative recognition. Neutralize constitutional status… Eliminate Reserve lands and extinguish Aboriginal Title. Dismantle Treaties.Russ Diabo, "Harper Launches Major First Nations Termination Plan," First Nations Strategic Bulletin (2012)
First Nations reject it outright. The White Paper is defeated in daylight. But defeat in public is not the end of a policy. It is the moment a policy goes indoors.
1973 – 1976
Sold as certainty and fairness
What could not pass as a bill is rebuilt as a procedure. In 1973 the Supreme Court's Calder decision forces Ottawa to concede that Aboriginal title is a real legal interest that survived European settlement. The government's response is not to honour it but to establish a desk to extinguish it by agreement.
The 1973 Statement on Claims of Indian and Inuit People originates the comprehensive land claims policy. In 1974 the Office of Native Claims is created inside the Department of Indian Affairs. The 1981 policy paper In All Fairness reaffirms the design. The government describes the machinery in its own words:
The primary thrust… was to obtain certainty… by negotiating an exchange of claims to undefined Aboriginal rights for a clearly defined package of rights and benefits.Crown–Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, on the policy's genesis in the 1973 Statement
Read plainly: give up the title you were just told is real, and in return receive a defined list of things the state chooses to grant. This is the back office. It is where the objective of 1969 has lived, continuously, ever since.
Sources: RCAANC · Specific Claims Tribunal · In All Fairness (1981)
1975
Sold as modern partnership
The James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, Canada's first "modern treaty," puts the new machinery to work. In exchange for a hydro megaproject on their lands, the Cree and Inuit signatories agree to the extinguishment of their claims over the wider territory. The exchange-for-certainty model is no longer a policy paper. It is a signed precedent that the following fifty years of "modern treaties" will follow.
Source: The Canadian Encyclopedia
2015 – 2016
Sold as compassion
Scott Gilmore, a former diplomat and Maclean's columnist, gives the old objective a new and gentler face. Writing after the January 2016 school shooting in La Loche, Saskatchewan, he argues that remote communities cannot be saved and that the only genuine help is to move people out of them:
The only way we can ever truly help the people of La Loche and hundreds of other remote communities like it, is to give those who want it a viable option to leave, to build lives in southern Canada.Scott Gilmore, "La Loche shows us it's time to help people escape the North," Maclean's, Jan 27 2016
In the same column comes the sentence that would recirculate for a decade:
If we really want to end the violence and depravation[sic] that plagues Canada's remote Aboriginal communities, we need to help them leave these communities, forever. And if we are still not ready to do that yet, then the least we can do to help is to send them a backhoe as they keep digging graves.Scott Gilmore, Maclean's, Jan 27 2016
Strip the compassion from the wording and the content is the White Paper's: empty the community, relocate the people, permanently. What 1969 proposed as law and the back office pursued as procedure, Gilmore now proposes as mercy.
Sources: Maclean's · Gilmore follow-up · CanadaLand (Chelsea Vowel)
2015 – 2024
Sold as reconciliation and rights
The modern vocabulary is "self-government," "reconciliation," and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Bill C-15). Diabo argues these are the same apparatus wearing its most flattering costume yet. The land-claims and self-government agreements, he writes, "all require the termination of Indigenous rights for some land, cash and delegated jurisdiction," converting nations into subordinate units:
[Canada aims to] convert Indian Act Bands into fourth-level Indigenous governments… lower in status than the federal, provincial, and municipal orders — turning Indigenous peoples into ethnic minorities as Indigenous-Canadians.Russ Diabo, 2021
He names it directly in his own section heading: "White Paper 2.0 — Termination by Municipalization." His 2024 title is blunter still: Reconciliation is Re-Colonization.
Sources: russdiabo.com · Georgia Straight
2026
Sold as public safety
On July 22, 2026, the man who published the relocation argument becomes Principal Secretary in the Prime Minister's Office. APTN reports the appointment under the headline "Carney's pick for advisor Scott Gilmore not sitting well with First Nations advocates," reproducing the backhoe passage as the basis for their alarm.
The argument that began as a defeated bill, survived as a claims desk, and returned as a magazine column has now completed its journey. It sits at the top of the office that sets the national agenda. The costume this time is the least arguable virtue of all: ending violence, keeping people safe.
Sources: APTN News · Globe and Mail · appointment record
1962 – 2009
The office as a family occupation
The apparatus is not only ideological. It has been, for the family now at its apex, an occupation. The Prime Minister's father, Robert James Carney (1933–2009), was principal of the Joseph Burr Tyrrell federal Indian day school in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, from 1962, and Chief Superintendent of Schools for the Territories from 1969 to 1971. He ran the schooling arm of the same system.
The precise record matters, because overstatement is what lets the record be dismissed. It was a day school, not a residential school — though Indigenous children boarding at Fort Smith's residential institutions attended it. In a 1965 CBC broadcast the elder Carney described a program for children he called "culturally retarded." He later became a University of Alberta professor whose scholarship is genuinely mixed: a 1991 study documenting abuse allegations across Western Arctic schools and a 1996 submission to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, alongside a habit of speaking well of the schools that has since made his work useful to residential-school denialists.
Asked about it in 2025, Mark Carney answered: "I love my father, but I don't share those views, to be absolutely clear."
The point is not inherited guilt. It is that the schooling arm, the claims desk, and the 2026 advisory chair are the same office across three generations of one household. Take the children. Extinguish the title. Empty the community.
Sources: CBC · CBC (Carney's response) · ActiveHistory
The children — the schooling arm
Residential and day schools, and later the histories written to soften them. Take the children.
The title — the land arm
The comprehensive-claims desk built in the mid-1970s, exchanging rights for certainty. Extinguish the title.
The community — the relocation arm
"Help them leave, forever," carried in print to the door of the PMO in 2026. Empty the community.
Three arms, one objective, changing its costume for whatever virtue each decade cannot say no to. That is the continuity. It is documented, not asserted — every station above rests on the state's own records or on the analyst, Russ Diabo, who has tracked the paper trail for forty years.
On Gilmore. He framed relocation as voluntary — "those who want it" — not as forced removal. The Métis writer Chelsea Vowel, who first surfaced the backhoe line, reads it as rhetoric for dramatic effect, not a literal proposal to dig graves. This file does not accuse him of proposing mass graves or forced relocation. The charge is narrower and it is his own: that he made permanently emptying Indigenous communities the centrepiece of what he called help.
On the Carneys. Robert Carney ran a day school, not a residential school, and did document abuse as well as minimize it. Mark Carney has disavowed his father's views on the record. The section is about an institutional lineage, not inherited guilt.
On Diabo. "Termination" is Diabo's characterization, argued over four decades. Government sources corroborate the scaffolding — the dates, the offices, the extinguishment-for-certainty language — but the normative reading is his, and it is presented as his.