The Auditor General has told us, and it's now well known, that we have woefully inadequate data on post-secondary indigenous students, and for a lot of reasons. We've counted them differently. We haven't counted them at all. A lot of communities still do not participate in the census or Statistics Canada's materials.
Now we have contact. Since I've been at Indspire, we've given out more than 32,000 bursaries. We have direct access to students. They trust us. They share information with us so that we can determine trends that will be helpful to policy-makers.
The problem is that I don't have resources to mine a lot of that information. We mine some of it now, but it would be very helpful in determining where to place the emphasis in the future in supporting students more in STEM, less over here, more in business, and also in taking apart what the challenges are. We know day care is a huge challenge, child care for our recipients who are women. What would we do?
Any area of policy would benefit, I think, from more accurate fulsome statistics on post-secondary indigenous students. Where are they going to school? Why are they going there? What is it that attracts them? How many degrees are they taking? Where is it that they see their future jobs could be? What barriers to those jobs do they see?
We track a lot of those things now. We do surveys and students participate. What I can't do at the moment is to make as much use of that information as I would like, and as policy-makers need, to make decisions for the future. That's why in our submission there's a very modest ask of $1.5 million over five years to enable us to do that.