The answer is that again it boils down to participation. What are the aboriginal people going into in their post-secondary education? It tends to be toward public sector careers, even though the market of available jobs is shrinking. I think the Government of Canada needs to engage aboriginal...and I think they're trying to. I think probably more aboriginal people have to start looking at these particular careers as being an option—careers in the digital economy, in technology, in engineering, in business, and so on and so forth.
Take Queen's University; in having a conversation with them, I think the aboriginal participation is less than 1%, or actually less than 0.5%, in terms of aboriginal people deciding to go into engineering. Yet you have industries screaming for these particular resources, especially to work on these localized natural resources projects. As Canada moves into being a natural resource-based economy as a way of building the nation's wealth, we need to focus in on that.
The other issue, I think, is getting urban aboriginal participation in the management level. You know, it's a crying shame that 60% of aboriginal people are living in the urban centres but we see such low participation in the management levels in corporations.
The flip side of it is getting the existing aboriginal people who are in corporate Canada to stand up and be counted. The government needs to do promotion around that. I believe there are probably more aboriginal people in corporate Canada, but they are not willing to be counted because they don't want to be identified. I think that's probably because of at least the perception of systemic racism in corporate Canada and within the management units they're working with.
So the Government of Canada could do efforts around that as well: stand up and be counted.