Yes. Thank you for the question.
There's emerging evidence that the mother tongue unlocks other opportunities for learning and does so with increased efficiency. So the way that a person learns and how they make the transition between learning and practical use often has quite a bit to do not only with the language that's spoken, but also with the cultural environment in which the education is given. So we see culture and language as being the key factors that we feel should be strengthened in our formal education system to unlock the true potential of our students.
Right now our graduation rate in the territory hovers between 25% and 30% for the people who enter grade 9 and then graduate from grade 12. That is not Inuit specific; the Inuit-specific numbers, we would argue, are much lower.
For people to feel that they're a part of the territory, that they are part of some sort of larger community, there has to be a link back into the community. There's this big disconnect in the education system between the Inuit and what the Inuit want for their children and what southern Canada or the curriculum maybe want for their children.
When children go through the education system—often in their second language—the parents or the communities do not see the relevance of supporting or really pushing their children's education, because they don't have any link back to their own culture or language.
I wouldn't say that this is necessarily the key in the minds of a lot of business people as to how to unlock the potential of Nunavut, but in our eyes it certainly would create a foundation for a graduate who is confident and who takes in every new opportunity or every new educational opportunity from a point of strength, and it's not somebody who's unilingual in Inuktitut, but is bilingual. Because it was never our intent to say that we would only want Inuktitut; we would like to be bilingual.