The Registrar, within the department of Indigenous Services Canada (ISC), is required by the Indian Act (Chapter I, Section 5 (1)) to record the names of individuals who are registered under the Act, in the Indian Register. The Indian Registration System (IRS) is a database which records individuals' names and a range of non-statutory data.
The publication Population registered under the Indian Act by Gender and Residence describes the IRS population as recorded at December 31, 2022. Descriptive statistics are developed from the IRS that include gender, residence, registry group, responsibility centre and region.
Data Organization
Entire registry groups with total membership of less than 40 people are suppressed from the datasets and indicated by an X in every cell. Furthermore, other techniques are in place such as suppression of individual cells smaller than 10 as well as suppression of adjacent cells to guard against residual disclosure. The counts of any suppressed cells, however, are included in aggregations to district, regional and national totals.
In total, data for 11 registry groups and general lists required suppression. In terms of registry groups, 4 in British Columbia were suppressed. As for general lists, there were 2 suppressions in Ontario, 1 in Manitoba, 2 in Saskatchewan, 1 in the Yukon and 1 in the Northwest Territories.
Differences from the 2021 Edition
In 2021, 22 individuals identified their gender as ‘Other’. Following confidentiality guidelines, data for these individuals were suppressed, including in any district, regional, and national totals. In 2022, while 106 individuals identified their gender as ‘Other’, data for these individuals were also suppressed for the same reasons.