The Supreme Court's decision proved very controversial, later influencing the wording of Section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms during the drafting process.

In the case's proceedings, counsel for the Attorney General of Canada presented evidence to the court demonstrating that Mrs. Lavell had not lived on a single reserve for a period of nine years before her marriage and that she had only made a few "sporadic" visits to her family.

In defence of this proposition, counsel noted that the Supreme Court has rejected the 'similarly situated doctrine' as the appropriate measure of a party's equality before the law.

Grossberg affirmed and upheld the Registrar's decision, holding that the impugned Section of the Indian Act did not discriminate against the appellant on the basis of sex.

Mr. Justice Thurlow, writing for a unanimous court, agreed, declaring the impugned section discriminatory on the basis of sex.

Citing the Supreme Court of Canada's decision in Drybones,[5] Justice Thurlow rejected the reasoning of Judge Grossberg that since all women, Canadian and Indian, were being treated the same under the Act that there was no deprivation of the appellant's equality before the law.

When she began to occupy the house on the reserve, the Six Nations Band Council passed a resolution ordering Mrs. Bédard to dispose of the property within the next six months, during which time she could live there.

On September 15, 1971, the Six Nations Band Council passed Resolution 15, requesting the Brantford District Supervisor to serve notice to Mrs. Bédard that she shall quit the Reserve.

The motion for an injunction was later withdrawn in court, with Mrs. Bédard's counsel agreeing that only a declaratory relief against the Six Nations Band Council would be sought.

The distinction made by the Indian Act, he asserts, whether the said distinction must be adverse or not to constitute discrimination, is clearly adverse toward the plaintiff to constitute discrimination: With respect to the Federal Court of Appeal's decision in Re Lavell and Attorney General of Canada,[7] he holds that it is not binding as a matter of stare decisis.

Judge Osler, however, held it of persuasive value which, in light of the reasons given by the Supreme Court of Canada in Drybones,[5] he found correct as a matter of law.

In particular, he agreed that since Indian women obtain a different result for marrying a non-Indian spouse, it is "plainly discrimination by reason of sex with respect to the rights of an individual to the enjoyment of property".

Such a proposition, he argued, stands in contrast to the Court's jurisprudence and the very tenets of the common law, and dismissed it as a thinly veiled assault on the powers given exclusively to the Federal Parliament by the Constitution: To suggest that the provisions of the Bill of Rights have the effect of making the whole Indian Act inoperative as discriminatory is to assert that the Bill [of Rights] has rendered Parliament powerless to exercise the authority entrusted to it under the constitution of enacting legislation which treats Indians living on Reserves differently from other Canadians in relation to their property and civil rights.

[19] It was a widely accepted convention, he argues, that an Act, in which Parliament exercises its constitutional functions, can only be changed or amended "by plain statutory language expressly enacted for the [that] purpose.

"[19] With respect to this case, he contended that Parliament did not intend to amend the Indian Act with the "use of broad general language directed at the statutory proclamation of the fundamental rights and freedoms enjoyed by all Canadians .

However, citing his dissent in Drybones, Pigeon chided the majority on the Court who would persist in giving the Bill of Rights "an invalidating effect over prior legislation".

First, Drybones decided that the Canadian Bill of Rights was "more than a mere interpretation statute whose terms would yield to a contrary intention."

In light of these reasons, Laskin asserted that it would be unprincipled for the Court to now construe Drybones as contingent solely on the basis that the impugned section of the Indian Act created a punishable criminal offence.

Since the impugned Section of the Indian Act imposes disabilities and prescribes disqualifications for members of the female sex that are not imposed upon members of the male sex in the same circumstances, Laskin argued that if the reasoning in Drybones was actually applied to the appeals the Court would have no choice but to find a denial of the respondents' equality before the law.

[36] Laskin declared that U.S. case law on the subject is "at best a marginal relevance" because of the limitations imposed on the judiciary by the Canadian Bill of Rights.

Even if such a test had been applied, Laskin contended that it is dubious that discrimination on the basis of sex could be justified as a 'reasonable classification' when "it has no biological or physiological rationale".

[39] In addition, Laskin asserted that the position taken by the appellants has no historical basis and even if it did, "history cannot avail against the clear words of ss.

Those sections, Laskin contended, makes it abundantly clear that the Canadian Bill of Rights does not contain purely declaratory provisions.

[40] Finally, Laskin discarded the argument that the discrimination in question is not offensive to the Bill of Rights simply because Parliament enacted the impugned section of the law under its constitutional authority as provided by the British North America Act.

"The majority opinion in the Drybones case", Laskin noted, "dispels any attempt to rely on the grant of legislative power as a ground for escaping from the force of the Canadian Bill of Rights.

Writing for himself in a dissenting opinion, Abbott indicated his agreement with Justice Laskin that Drybones cannot be distinguished from the two cases under appeal.

[44]: 1087 The impact of Section 12(1)(b) of the Indian Act, which was upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada in Lavell, continued to have devastating consequences for women.

[45] The fundamental distinction between the present case and that of Drybones, however, appears to me to be that the impugned section in the latter case could not be enforce without denying equality of treatment in the administration and enforcement of the law before the ordinary courts of the land to a racial group, whereas no such inequality of treatment between Indian men and women flows as a necessary result of the application of s. 12(1)(b) of the Indian Act.