I wanted to add to what Elvera had said. What's missing, too, are the O and M dollars—the cost that's given to the provinces to take care of the administration. We have to do that with the little budgets that we have. On top of that, in Quebec, with language, we have to translate everything. All of our meetings are translated as they are here. That's costly.
Every document we produce for the 29 communities in our ASETS has to go through that same system. Child care costs go there. The communities are far away from urban centres where the training sites are so we have to pay for that transportation.
That just reduces the number of people who we can really help, when we know, as she mentioned, that the duration of working with someone from the state that they are in to being employable....
Aboriginal kids who graduate from high school and who make it to the post-secondary level, I'm willing to bet had a foundation around them that nurtured them to stay in school. The issue is that we're dealing with the other half of the population that is living in poverty and living in social disarray with suicide, alcoholism, drugs, crime, and violence. Those are the students who need our help. Those are the clients who come to us and they want to work, but we realize afterwards that they have all of these other hindrances in their lives.
Even when we get someone through the whole scope of employment—just socially integrating into a job can be very challenging for an aboriginal. It's a culture shock, and many of them return and say, “Do you know what? I can't make it in that industry”, and they want to try another field. This compounds what we're trying to do overall with the limited dollars we have.