Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I want to thank Mr. Dinsdale for his appearance today.
I too have friendship centres in my riding--Hiiye'yu Lelum and Tillicum Haus--and both are very fine examples of organizations that do a great deal of good service to the community. They are involved in a wide range of programs and our community would be sorely disadvantaged if they were not in place. Although I can't directly correlate it, one of the friendship centres did temporarily lose some funding for some youth programs, and we saw youth vandalism go up in the community significantly. When that funding was reinstated the vandalism started to taper off again. So although no study was done, there seems to be a link.
I want to just briefly go back to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. It clearly talked about the need to pay attention to urban aboriginal peoples, and it talked about the fact that people wanted to be able to maintain their distinctive cultures and to exercise significant governance over their daily lives. In this overview that I've got, by Newhouse and Peters, there was a paper by Richards and Vining that talked about exploring the “correlates of Aboriginal student success off reserve”. They looked at recommending facilitating aboriginal participation in the school system through strategies such as the introduction of a distinct aboriginal school system, or the development of schools with special mandates to honour aboriginal tradition.
I wonder if you could comment on ways the friendship centre can contribute to helping aboriginal peoples maintain a distinctive culture and some of that cultural heritage that's so important.