First of all, good morning, and thank you for the invitation. It's nice to be here. It's nice to talk about a subject that's so close to my work and to some of my passion in my work.
On behalf of Grand Chief Michel, Vice-Chiefs Henderson and Deranger, and the Prince Albert Grand Council, I'd like to say we appreciate being invited to the table on such a topic.
I'd like to start by saying I wish I had the documents in French and English, but it was a short time. I was dealing with schools and their reading programs, and this came up, and I tried to get a jump on it as fast as I could. I wish I could have had it here, but time was tight.
I'm not sure what part of the document is going to be looked at, so maybe just out of courtesy we could stick with the charts, if that would be fine.
I'd like to start by saying that the work you see in front of you is part of a larger project. Three to four years ago at the Prince Albert Grand Council we started taking a look at what we were doing in our schools and making solid decisions and policies and setting direction. To do that, it was important for us to gather data that was reliable from a number of sources: Canada-wide, province-wide, northern Saskatchewan-wide, and then right from our communities themselves.
From that point we looked at K to 12 education, because that's where we were primarily focused at the time and that's where a lot of exciting things are taking place.
As we did that project and we looked at the indicators--the first document--we realized it's very difficult to talk about K to 12 education without that bleeding into post-secondary and into the labour market, because they're all tied together so tightly. When we did this project...we now have three documents. What I'd like to do is go through some of the charts.
When I was given a call the other day, they asked if I could talk about post-secondary education and about some of the factors that are taking place, particularly in our world, in the grand council. What I'd like to do, if it's possible, is just jump to those, because I know I have a short time, and then if you have questions, I'll be more than happy.
So if you would, please, on page 3...oh, we don't have the document.