By Karen Bird, Professor of Political Science, McMaster University Canadians have often looked to Aotearoa New Zealand as an established model for electoral inclusion of Indigenous voices. But local elections recently held in New Zealand offer an important cautionary tale for Canada, where treaty rights remain contested terrain and Indigenous self-determination is often misunderstood or politicized. In New Zealand’s October 2025 local elections, voters in 24 of 42 municipalities voted to remove their Māori wards — seats dedicated to Indigenous Māori voters — by 2028. The wards were designed to guarantee the representation of Māori in local government decision-making processes. While seeming to reverse progress toward Indigenous representation at the municipal level, the larger story is that the national government forced local councils to hold these polls regardless of whether…
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