I laughed when I first saw those two UK-ancestry Indian girls who's mother had them 'identify' as First Nations in order to get tons of free grants / govt support, which they used to setup businesses and such... and the news was like "Why would someone do this?!?". For the money and govt perks, obviously.
One thing I didn't see much of in the article, were options to resolve the issue aside from a brief note about there not being many options currently. So what options do we realistically have to address the issue?
Do FN not keep a registry of their people, and/or do they not have established processes for third party's to verify identity claims via a simple form? Like do businesses have an option, sorta like running a background check with law enforcement, to check an identity?
I'd personally vote to remove the incentive for the frauds. Race-based benefits that are so lopsided you have people committing fraud to get those perks, a situation that seems antithetical to what the Charter and democratic nations are built on: that all races are equal. Remove individual govt incentives based on race -- no bursaries, grants, funding, tax breaks, etc. Have the fed gov supports be based exclusively on nation-to-nation type supports, sorta like they do with the provinces in terms of fund transfers, and base those transfers on the division of responsibility between FN and Canada, tied to the treaties where possible. Instead of having oblique benefits paid out to individuals spread across the entire country via tax breaks etc, have the funds be directly applied to 'nations' to fix things like drinking water availability. If an FN has no one living in their area, or if they free-ride off of colonial infrastructure that's been built, they get less 'national' funding -- sorta like if a foreign country came in and built a port for Canada to use, and we had free use of it, it'd be nuts for the govt to then up our taxes to pay for a new port... cause it's already there and available.