If I may, I want to jump in before we run out of time to share an anecdote and also to partly answer your question.
There is another initiative that I got involved with in B.C., the Breakfast Club of Canada. Let's not overlook that a hungry child doesn't do well in school. When I was involved we got Grand Chief Ed John involved as well. There's a first nations component in B.C. to the breakfast clubs initiative. It started in Quebec, but I think it's now pretty pan-Canadian. Don't lose sight of that very basic need, kids going hungry.
I wanted to also share an anecdote. I don't know, and it would be interesting to learn from Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development how pervasive it is, but when I visited the North American Palladium mine five or six years ago outside of Thunder Bay, the participation rate of aboriginal people at the mine was quite low. I asked the question why the community nearby, about a half an hour away so maybe two hours from Thunder Bay, had no secondary school. It stopped at primary. The kids who wanted to go to high school had to go to Thunder Bay.
I ask all of you, or all of us here, how many of us would want to send our kids, at the age of 12 or 13, two hours away, perhaps for the week, to attend high school? Most of us don't have to deal with that. It's kind of like a perpetuation of residential schools in some way because they have to leave their families if they want to get high school education. No wonder we have this problem. I just wonder how many communities are like that.
Of the ones who do go to Thunder Bay, some of them succeed but some of them just end up dropping out of school there and then becoming a destitute, urban aboriginal person on the streets in Thunder Bay, or they stay in their community and don't go to high school. We need to address those fundamental needs, and I'm hopeful that the new initiative that the Prime Minister and Shawn Atleo announced and that investment in schools on reserves will start to address that issue. I just wanted to share that story.