If you look at the Métis community—and I'll give you an example of the economic incentives that occur in our community as indicators of jobs—our traditional economy is one of the pivotal creators of jobs. I'm talking about forestry, commercial fishing, tourism, trapping—pivotal traditional economies. They were the backbone of our communities. Most of those are now factored out. They've either been pushed out by bigger companies coming in from the United States and taking over the forestry--for example, in Manitoba--or the commercial fishery is being overrun by fresh water corporations. It's suffocating the industry. As these economies fall, we're seeing the communities falling apart.
I'll use my community of Duck Bay as the easiest example. We had a promising community, a booming community. We used to have five stores in our little community; today we have zero. We still have a population of 800 in that little community, but the entire economy is crumbling. You're seeing the 70% of people employed revert to 70% on welfare. No factory is coming tomorrow to replace this lack of traditional economies as they fade away.
Either we think outside the box and create new opportunities or we have to lift all these people from their rural areas and put them into urban centres to try to find jobs, because there are no other jobs coming tomorrow to replace the traditional economies that are crumbling.
It's a scary thing. It worries us a lot as leaders. Our Métis people have always been entrepreneurial and hard working. We pay hundreds of millions in taxes. At the end of the day, we're going to become a social problem if something is not done to change it quickly.