I wouldn't attempt to speak for all the other nations in the country, by any means, but I will provide some perspective on what I think about the issue of the 150th birthday and perhaps the perspective of some aboriginal people within my organization.
I believe there would be a strong desire to celebrate it as much as the rest of Canada would. Of course, there is a long history behind that, as Mr. Chartier pointed out on the Métis side, and on the first nation and Inuit side as well. It is not always a pretty history with aboriginal people.
In terms of where aboriginal people are, in my organization when we deal with 60%-plus of the aboriginal population in urban centres, we are dealing with, to be honest, the real low end of the social strata on almost every indicator that you can possibly imagine. On health, education, welfare, you name it, the aboriginal people are at the bottom of those indicators in Canada. I think if we come to look at ourselves in Canada in terms of how we are making progress within this country after 150 years, we need to come to terms with the place of aboriginal people within our society.
One way, I would politely suggest, is that we could have legacy projects beside those just celebrating the history; there's also going forward and how we encourage this very large youth population to be economic participants within society.
When I look at the programs by which friendship centres run, the major programs, I see that they have been, in my opinion, structurally impoverished since the late 1980s--with not even cost-of-living increases--so whether that is the friendship centre program itself, which is run by the Department of Canadian Heritage, which your committee oversees.... Even for the cultural connections for aboriginal youth, for youth programs, the funding has not changed in over 20 years for some of these programs.
So when we talk about a legacy, I would suggest maybe it's a legacy of investment in the future of the country through young people, including through things like language, through Michif and the other aboriginal languages as well, to preserve the 50-plus aboriginal languages within the country. This is a certain sort of perspective that aboriginal people might have coming toward the 150th birthday of the country, when they are struggling to make ends meet, struggling to go to school, struggling to find housing in urban settings, and struggling to raise their families and children. So that is perhaps a different perspective to put on the celebration.