Certainly.
And in terms of the shifting of the educational funding, it is being done by a federal department, not the band.
I'd like to point out an example from when I worked at Timiskaming First Nation in Notre-Dame-du-Nord, Quebec. We had a child with heavy, heavy special needs. The federal government would not put money into first nation special education needs. However, we put that child on a bus with an adult and drove that child across the border to an Ontario public school and paid a person to watch that child in the hall all day. The province would then ding the federal government for the full cost of all of that service.
We met with the Minister of Indian Affairs at the time—it was a previous government—and we asked if it wouldn't be a lot simpler to take that same amount of funding and put it into special education on our reserve school in Quebec, as we could then hire three teachers and probably deal with six children. The only thing we got was a shrug.
Again, there is no accountability, there are no standards, there are no targeted measures that any educational authority in this country would have to live by.
How is it that in 2008 we don't have these most basic standards for education and for ensuring child welfare at the federal level?