I agree with you that celebrations are nice. They're perhaps galvanizing. People get focused on a date, and they're galvanized towards it. That plays an important role in celebrating Canada. As a legacy project, I would say we need to invest in aboriginal people. The question is, how do we do that? We need to invest in reflecting the demographic realities of where they are. They're young, unemployed, and facing social issues.
It would be a legacy project for the Government of Canada to reinvest in itself. How would it do that? It would look at the existing infrastructure through friendship centres and through first nations or Métis organizations, the infrastructure that Canada has helped build but has let slide over the last couple of decades. Reinvest in that seriously. That's how we deal with those social issues. It's proven to be successful when aboriginal people have self-created friendship centres: they are self-determined; it's aboriginal people running programs for themselves, essentially. It has proven to be successful over 60 years.
Then we need to look seriously at investing in our youth. How do we do that? Education is one, but we have to prepare the fertile ground for them to take up education. I would say there should be a serious expansion of the aboriginal head start program off reserve, where the majority of aboriginal people are. Almost every friendship centre I know has one. They're under-resourced. You can have maybe 23 children.... Here in Ottawa, there are almost 30,000 aboriginal people in the area, so there are more than 23 aboriginal kids who need a head start program.
We need to invest in things that work. We know head starts work. We know friendship centre structures work. We need to look back at what we were doing and proceed forward. That's what I would consider a real legacy—investing back into young people, to be honest.