As we told the royal commission in 1992.... Senator Marchand was the chair and has now passed on. He was the first indigenous person to sit in Pierre Trudeau's cabinet. I've been around for the last eight prime ministers or 18 ministers of indigenous affairs. I've been trying to find a way to increase the number of indigenous people. In the 2008 election, for example, we had nearly one million people, and we had one indigenous MP elected, and that was from the Northwest Territories.
We've been very good in the electoral system in getting communities of interest to vote together. Look at our minority language voting groups in Québec. We make sure that we draw the boundaries around them to strengthen their ability to produce people. We do that in Atlantic Canada to some degree.
The challenge for the Métis is that we're spread so far across such a large territory that there's no ability for vote concentration, except in those northern ridings. We have the Churchill and the Churchill River ridings, and we produce indigenous candidates there all the time.
We're 4% of the population in Canada, and you'd think we should have 4% of the number of MPs. I know this isn't on the subject, but we need to change the electoral system to make it more responsive to the indigenous population, for sure. There is no doubt about it.