I agree with Dr. Cappon that one of our problems is that efforts are often made in isolation and are not seen by anybody else anywhere in the country. Some excellent pilots took place 20 or 30 years ago. There are currently some successful pilots, in Saskatchewan and B.C. particularly, working very well that deal with at least major chunks of the issues before you today.
To actually have a big effect on the aboriginal question, we need to be able to bring people like Indian and Northern Affairs Canada together with the school boards, the provincial organizations, and the teachers' organizations. We're doing not so much more with the immigrants and the workers. The concept that you heard a few minutes ago of students disappearing is more common than any of you would like to think, and it happens particularly in all of those vulnerable groups. As for aboriginal students, as soon as somebody tries to help them, bang, they're gone, back to another community, and there's no coordination between agencies or provinces to try to track them and help them and to actually deal with the issue. Clearly, there's a coordination role and an information role that other partners can play.
I'd also like to pick up on the accountability piece and to note that the targets can't always be measured in numbers, but that doesn't make them any less important. If we're going to look at immigrant children or aboriginal children and improving their performance in school, we can count how many years they attend or how much the completion rate changes. But there are all kinds of things we can look at that are at least as important to the children's lives and the future they see for themselves. The targets can't just be quantifiable, measurable targets. They need to be targets that are meaningful for the country and for the people living in poverty.