The answer is no, not enough is being done. On the numbers I recall, a quarter of a million aboriginal youth between the ages of 18 and 34 are going to step out of the post-secondary education system with degrees. Is the corporate world ready to absorb these folks? During our royal commission, the Conference Board of Canada said it could only absorb 60,000 of those people.
There is not enough being done. What more needs to be done?
From a labour perspective, one of the things we are doing in the labour movement is recognizing what we need to change in the collective agreement process that will actually take a look at collective agreement language and be more welcoming to bringing in an aboriginal workforce. If we take a look at the shortfall we are going to be facing in terms of skills and labour shortages in the next six to twelve years, the only cohort in Canada that has a positive growth rate and has the capacity to address it is the aboriginal, Métis, and Inuit communities. From a labour perspective, from an employer perspective, from a community perspective, from an educational perspective, and from a collective agreement perspective, we need to double and triple our efforts at a rate that we can't do.
Bringing it back to the current context, I noticed a doubling of the ASEP program in the budget. It's great and good news, but it's not even close to the amount of investment in human resources and human capital that is necessary to deal with that. If we don't make a financial and political shift, we're going to miss out enormously.