It's my pleasure to be here.
I know time is short, so I'm going to try to be as quick as possible, and have some opportunity for dialogue.
I've passed out a little slide presentation, which is based on a longer report. The longer report, which I highly recommend to you, as the author, is available free on the Caledon Institute website.
Let me take you through some of the highlights of the slide show that I've handed out, and then we'll have a discussion.
In the slide show I begin with a discussion of some of the demographics. The slide show itself I think is available in both languages. I won't spend a lot of time on demographics, because presumably you're familiar with these. I'm discussing in my presentation data empirical evidence from the censuses, the censuses in 2001 and 1996 in particular. My data are about what is called the aboriginal identity population; that is, those persons who identify themselves as aboriginal when asked in the census or who are members of a band or who are first nations members. That's approximately a million people in Canada.
The aboriginal identity population as a percentage of population is on the second slide. I think it's important to note, in terms of understanding where the social and economic impacts of the success or the lack of success of the aboriginal population will be in Canada, to understand where the population concentrations are. It is very much in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Unfortunately, as you'll see in my presentation, much of the worst results are also in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. So we have both the highest proportion in population and the highest concentration of challenge.
The next few slides address some important demographic data and some of the mythology that we hear. The slide on page 5 shows the future aboriginal workforce among the provinces that is between the ages of 15 and 65. We sometimes hear that the aboriginal workforce will be 50% in Saskatchewan. That's not quite true, but it will be a very large proportion of the population in Saskatchewan--closer to 20%, a little less than 20%.
Similarly, we also hear a myth that there's mass migration off reserve. I suppose that's based on anecdotal observations. On the slide on page 6, I show the data from the 1996 and 2001 censuses, and it's very clear that there is not mass migration off reserve; in fact, that's far from the case. In fact, I would say the growth on reserve is about 54,000 people, in absolute terms, between the two censuses, and that growth is most likely natural growth, if I can call it that, rather than an increasing number of people identifying themselves as aboriginal.
If you look at growth due to population and demographics, I would say that probably your largest growth is on reserve. It is definitely not shrinking. Where there is some shrinkage, in percentage terms, is in the rural areas of Canada, which is reflective of the situation generally and demographically in Canada.
Also, on the next slide.... I don't know how many times people have said to me, “Do you know where the largest urban concentration of aboriginals in Canada, in any city, is?”, and I say, “Where?” They say, “Toronto”, and I say, “No, that's not the case”. There are 14 cities with an aboriginal population over 5,000, and by far the largest urban concentration is in Winnipeg. Next it's Edmonton, and then Vancouver.
In percentage terms it's a little different, obviously. I think it's important to understand urban concentrations because a lot of the dynamics of new cultural development as well as a lot of the challenges in terms of issues of adaptation, etc., are being felt and will be felt in those cities, particularly Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Vancouver.
I have a few slides on socio-economic status. I'm not going to spend any time on those except to say that they are, unfortunately, what you would expect; that is, that the socio-economic status of aboriginal people is, by most indicators, generally worse--much lower--than that of the general population. But there is one important proviso, and that is, if you look at the aboriginal populations in the east, essentially Toronto and east, you'll find that those populations, by socio-economic indicator, do not have the lowest socio-economic indicators of any population. In other words, if you look at some of the recent immigrant groups, for example, in Toronto, or if you look at, unfortunately, some of the black communities in Toronto, you'll find that the socio-economic indicators are lower than those of the aboriginal community. It does not stand out as a community with a significant substantial difference that you can just see by looking at the data. That's not true in the west. In the west the population clearly with the lowest socio-economic indicators is the aboriginal population. I think that makes a significant difference.
Going on to education, which is the subject we're interested in, and trying to be quicker, I look at three indicators from the census. Those are, first, the failure to complete high school--that's a negative, and the more who do that, the worse it is--then the success in completing either non-university post-secondary education, or, the third indicator, completing university post-secondary education. Page 11 or slide 11 shows the estimated rate of failure to complete high school. You can see that this is very high among the aboriginal population. It remained high in 2001. In fact, the gap between the aboriginal population and the non-aboriginal population really didn't change much. The next page, slide 12, looks at non-university post-secondary education, and there's a positive story to tell here, and it is that the aboriginal population is getting close to the non-aboriginal population in post-secondary education, almost at parity. We'll see that there is even some better news when you look at that on a regional breakdown. We'll see that on a later slide. However, with respect to the third indicator, university post-secondary education, as we've just heard from Roberta and I'm sure you've heard many times before, things are not good at all. The completion by the aboriginal population of university is very low compared to the non-aboriginal population.
These results are disconcerting. So I say to myself, it's one thing to look at the population aged 15 to 65; what happens if I look at the population aged 20 to 24, just to pick a young segment? You'd expect that population to be most influenced by the changes we've had in the last few years in the education system. The answer, unfortunately, is not positive. Slide 14 shows the results for just the population aged 20 to 24, total population versus aboriginal population. You can see, particularly on failure to complete high school, that among the aboriginal population today aged 20 to 24, the failure to complete high school remains over 40%, which I found quite astonishing.
I'm going to skip over some of the next ones, which show some of the regional breakdown, except I want to point to one slide that I think is critically important, particularly in respect of INAC's responsibilities. That's slide 16. This is the high school completion rate on reserve. You can see that it is startling. This is the failure to complete high school for the population aged 20 to 24--not the whole population, just the population aged 20 to 24--in the 2001 census. So these are young adults who went to school in the 1980s and 1990s, not in the 1950s. You can see that in Manitoba the on-reserve failure to complete is around 70%. In the paper I've written, I've described this as a social disaster much like a hurricane or another kind of social disaster, except that it's taking a long time to happen and it's happening in slow motion.
Slide 17 shows the gap in non-university post-secondary education, broken down by region. I'd just point out that in the east, aboriginal students are completing non-university post-secondary education more than some of the non-aboriginal students.
I want to skip to some of the main findings that were interesting, in slide 20. I want to stress that this is data-driven. These are my findings but not my data; this is the census data. I said okay, we know there are way fewer aboriginal students graduating from post-secondary, completing post-secondary, but what happens if we look just at high school students and compare only high school students among the aboriginal population and the non-aboriginal population? It turns out that if we do that, the success in completing some form of post-secondary education is about the same. Those results were pretty robust. I looked at them statistically in a number of ways: by region, which is shown in a little graph on next slide, by gender, and so on--and they remained there. The difference is that if you look at the little bars on slide 20, both populations of aboriginal graduates, about 75%, about three-quarters, went on to complete some form of post-secondary education, but much lower for university.
To conclude, the first thing I'd like to say is that I would like this research to be investigated a little more deeply. I'm using aggregate data, not micro-data. There's a lot that could be challenged. When I've given this kind of presentation to others, particularly researchers, I've said “Get off your butts and do some decent research, because maybe I'm wrong and it's too important a finding and needs to be corroborated by other researchers.” I'm quite willing to be found to be wrong, but I don't think I am.
In my view, what this means is that every single aboriginal student who gets into a post-secondary education institution is vitally important to Canada and to their communities, an incredible opportunity to make a contribution to our future. I hate to see any student drop out or be lost. I'm not trying to say it's one versus the other. I don't think we have the luxury of that kind of trade-off. But given the reality that this data seems to indicate, if we want to get parity in post-secondary education, the only way we're going to get there is through kindergarten to grade 12. The only way we're going to get there is by getting more kids graduating from high school. Otherwise the pool of students who can get into post-secondary is simply too small.
I'll stop there, Mr. Chair, having gone over my time by a few minutes.
