All right guys, I took a closer look and lo and behold, no one really knows how many will register and how long it will take. The estimate of $407 million is just that. And Rwede, you rounded down to $400 M and threw 7 million away? Anyways, it took TWO deadline extensions sought in court to get the Liberals to eliminate all gender based former legislation. So this new reality
could cost Canada $407 M, but truly no one really knows and it's tax money being recycled back into the Canadian economy hopefully to be spent on goods and services in Canada. Hopefully right?
Fréchette’s costing puts ballpark figures on the number of people expected to register as status Indians after the new law comes into effect. With the original version of Bill S-3, about 90 per cent of a pool of 28,000 to 35,000 people were expected to register. Whenever the expanded clauses come into effect, there could be up to 670,000 more eligible people, of which about 270,000 or 40 per cent are expected to actually register.
It is on these numbers, expectations that most people will not move back to reserves, and the average cost of benefits per person, per year, that Fréchette based his analysis. The estimates are subject to “a high degree of uncertainty due to a lack of evidence regarding registration rates, administration plans and long-term migration patterns,” the report says. “The full annual costs will not be realized until eligible persons are registered, which will take many years.”
During House debate about the new revisions to Bill S-3, Kevin Lamoureux, a parliamentary secretary to the House leader, lauded how the legislation will
fix all known gender inequities in the Indian Act — and included his compliments to “feminist prime minister” Justin Trudeau. “It is hard to imagine how we could justify these inequities. We know we could never justify it in 2017,” he said.
But the Liberals didn’t originally intend to go as far. It took well over a year, two deadline extensions sought in court and several stalemates with the Senate before government legislators agreed with longtime Indigenous advocates and senators.