I thank the member for the question.
I'll begin with a short history because there's a well-established document that answers your question. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples published a report in 1996 that had a really interesting paper within it called “The Cost of Doing Nothing”, which is precisely the point that you raise. At the time that was roughly $11 billion. I did a recalculation of that about five years ago and it was well above $20 billion at the time. I haven't recalculated it since, but I can assure you that it vastly exceeds the $7 billion per year that we're talking about in the entire submission here.
As I tried to emphasize in my remarks about the priority areas that we wanted to highlight, all of these have enormous returns on investment both through the reduction in social cost and the concomitant productivity increase, which leads to gains in Canada's GDP. Those will be vastly outstripped. The reference I made to the 1.5% was the result of a study from the Canadian Centre for the Study of Living Standards in 2017 that estimated it at approximately $37 billion, just in reducing the gap in outcomes on education and employment alone.
As you can see, all of those numbers exceed the investment required in order to benefit Canada and first nations simultaneously by multiple-fold.