Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I really appreciate each and every one of you for coming here today to give your testimony in this hearing.
My comments and questions are going to be directed towards Perry, as well as Cindy. I'm very proud that the government did not continue to fight the Human Rights Tribunal and the First Nations Child and Caring Society. It's fun to see that when you advocate behind the scenes, sometimes governments can take a step back. Sometimes we'd like the road to be very short, though sometimes it's still long.
I often think about our children. How our indigenous children have become a form of a natural resource in the child and families services systems in this country. There are 11,000 kids in care in Manitoba and some not for the right reasons. Some 87% are not there because of abuse, but negligence, the inability of parents to provide food and housing for their children. I think these are telling statistics.
Sometimes we think it's easier to take the children from the families and give them to someone else to raise, while we provide funds and monies to those children, either off-reserve or on-reserve. This is still the present, but it's also the past. I hope it can become the past.
I was wondering, Cindy, if you had solutions. What should the federal government be doing with the money that we're spending? Do you have programs that we could be implementing in order to make this something really in the past?