Thank you.
Good afternoon, honourable members of Parliament. I'd like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to address the committee today.
I'll start off by introducing myself. My name is Trevor Lewis, and I'm here representing the National Association of Indigenous Institutes of Higher Learning. That's an advocacy organization made up of members from indigenous-controlled post-secondary and training institutes across Canada. I'm the chair of that organization.
Perhaps I can give you just a little bit of personal information. I come from a place called Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, which is about two and a half hours southwest of here, between Belleville and Kingston. I work there at an organization called the First Nations Technical Institute, which is itself an aboriginal-controlled post-secondary and training institute. It has been offering educational opportunities for over 21 years. Further to that, provincially we have an organization in Ontario called the Aboriginal Institutes' Consortium, of which I'm also the chair. So I'm a both provincial and national chair for these organizations that are moving issues forward for aboriginal-controlled post-secondary and training institutes.
In the interest of time, I'll give you just some brief background. Nationally we have institutes in Ontario that, as I said, have been in existence for over 20 years. There are institutes in Alberta; right now there's an institute celebrating its twentieth anniversary, and some older ones exist there. In B.C. a number of institutes are doing similar things in education and training, and they have been in existence for quite some time. Of course, everybody has probably heard of First Nations University in Saskatchewan, formerly the SIFC, provincially recognized in Saskatchewan in partnership with the University of Regina.
Our institutes exist to provide learning opportunities to aboriginal people and first nations communities by being in the communities, by being community-based, close to the learners, implementing alternative delivery scenarios, creating unique cultural learning environments, and making content relevant to the culture, history, and lived experiences of the learners. Our primary business is to create educational opportunities for first nations and aboriginal learners. It's not simply an outreach program for our institutes; they are actual, real post-secondary educational organizations. We specialize in providing successful opportunities for aboriginal people, and should not be considered an add-on or a stepping stone to mainstream.
When it comes to some of our struggles, if I had a lot more time I could go on and on about them. The federal government has taken the position that support for post-secondary education is a matter of social policy rather than legal responsibility. As a consequence, federal support has not evolved with the reality of the growth of our institutes or the growth of our student population.
I understand that the Assembly of First Nations made a presentation to you last week noting that the INAC education budget has essentially been frozen since 1996, subject to an annual 2% cap. That creates a major gap when our young population and students wish to go on to post-secondary. The number is growing, but the funding to allow the students to go has been frozen.
The lack of evolution in federal policy and funding has meant a lack of the government operating and capital grants normally accessible to the mainstream, to colleges and universities, and therefore a lack of security for our institutes, which are doing basically the same thing. A lack of recognition for the granting of diplomas, degrees, and certificates means that our institutes are faced with establishing partnerships with the mainstream to issue the academic credentials. Often these are economically unjust, because the mainstream partners are able to get operating costs, using the normal way of getting funding for student grants, for our students, since our students are registered in their programs. Our organizations then have to find funding elsewhere to pay for a program's operating costs.