I think one of the things that we need to keep in mind is that these are little kids who at every turn of their lives are getting less of an opportunity to succeed and be healthy. They don't know that people in Ottawa are making a decision that they get less; they just know that life is really hard for them, and when they go on the Internet they see other youth doing quite well.
Then there's the Canadian public, who often don't know any better, and who judge them and their communities as if they get more than everybody else, not less. What happens to these children and these youth is that they start to internalize that and feel they aren't worth it, that they aren't smart, that they'll never go anywhere. That's why we see the high correlation between inequity and youth suicide, why we see the high correlation between inequity and child health issues, inequity and juvenile justice, and the inequity in child welfare.
The symptoms are profound when you disrupt equal opportunity for children. That's why that Spirit Bear plan is so essential. It's because we have to know what all these inequalities are, because in 2017 we cannot be a society that accepts racial discrimination as government policy toward children at any level, yet we are accepting it. Let's make that clear: we are accepting that we are giving first nations kids less funding for education, less funding for child welfare. Once we do that, we normalize it, and it's easy to perpetuate it. We need to say there's no acceptable level of racial discrimination against children, first nations children or any other children, in public policy in the Canadian government.