Yet we still don't have engineers, doctors, or dentists. We have some nurses, and we also have an overabundance—I don't like to say this—of teachers. I don't think that's a bad thing because I am a former high school math and science teacher. So we have an overabundance of teachers, and we continue to invest in those people...our lawyers. We continue to invest in those professional people in our community.
When we talk about the barriers to post-secondary education that exist today, we look at our community, and in the last four years we have sent an average of seventy people a year to post-secondary institutions, either universities or community colleges. We've been able to do that.
But when we talk about barriers to access, one of the biggest barriers from a community perspective—and I know you've heard this time and time again—is the issue of funding. Currently, my community receives an allocation of approximately $12,200 to send one person to a post-secondary institution. When I started my job nine years ago, the amount of money we received—and I remember this because it was the first figure I had to deal with at a meeting—was $11,726 per student for post-secondary education.
I remember meeting with the Canada student loans people eleven years ago. At that time, the cost of a university education was about $12,000 to $13,000, so we were close.
In the last nine years, since I've been a director of education in Membertou, the average university tuition cost for the community to pay for someone to go to university has been approximately $3,600. Today the cost to send one person to university is $6,300. So we have this huge $2,700 increase; the cost of living has gone up, and things have risen.
Unfortunately, our funding levels have been stabilized for the last ten years. While we're still expected to send the same number of people to university, now we have to do it with a lot fewer dollars, and we haven't been as successful as we need to be.
We had this large influx of professional people into our community. It's starting to taper off, because it's becoming more and more difficult for students to go to university and be successful. For one of the few times in our history, we have students applying for Canada students loans. I don't think that's a bad thing. I do think that as a community we need to be better attuned to making sure we give our students the tools they need to be successful.
Funding is the first issue. I think the latest report from the Canada student loans people is somewhere in the vicinity of $17,000 for one year of university. We've done a calculation in Membertou, based on how much it would cost, given the rise in tuition. We now spend more money for utilities for people. Textbooks have increased in cost in the last nine years.
When I did an independent study, it cost our community approximately $16,700 to send one person to post-secondary, and unfortunately we receive about $12,200. Anybody who does the math knows that we're about 33% underfunded on a per student basis. That makes it very difficult. It means that at this point we have to begin to pick and choose which students go to university and which students don't. I don't like to be in the position where I have to tell people how to prioritize their dreams.
That's the first issue that I'd like for you to be aware of: the funding issue.
The second issue that I think this committee should be aware of is that, as it stands right now, when we send some first nations person to university in Canada, we are as successful as any person going to university. That to me is an amazing statistic. When we talk about gaps, there is no gap in students' success at university between first nations people and the rest of Canada.
The gap is in our ability to get to university. We are not getting to university in the same numbers, we are not getting to university at the same time, and we are certainly not getting there at the same stages of our life. I think the majority of first nations students in Canada who go to university go as mature students. They're not going out of high school, because we're not finishing high school in the same numbers as the rest of Canada.
That's the second issue that we as a country need to be concerned with. How do we find solutions to get our young people through high school? How do we prepare them to become students at the post-secondary level? That's the second thing I wanted to raise.
The third thing I wanted to raise was the need for a true partnership to exist between first nations and institutions of higher learning. I'm going to give you another example quickly.
I come from a community that has a financial position that allows us to be viewed by the universities as a true partner, because we can bring more to the table than just tuition dollars. We no longer just pay the bills and that's it. We have the ability to go to the universities to say we want to buy programs.
In our community, one of the things we have done successfully—and we're doing it again right now—is sign a memorandum of understanding with a Nova Scotia community college a few years ago. When I first started my job in 1997, we had no students attending community college from our community. Last year we sent over forty. Signing that MOU with the community college and asking them to invest in our people, to invest in a first nations counsellor, to invest in different things, and to come to do some public education in our community around the need for post-secondary education has paid dividends in a very big way for our community.
We are now going through that process with the Cape Breton University and are preparing to sign an MOU with them. It's because they now view us as equal partners in this process. We've gone to them and have said, we'd like you to sign an MOU with us. So we're signing an MOU with the Cape Breton University, and part of that MOU says we want not just access to getting in the door and being successful, but we want Cape Breton University to begin to invest in our people.
Give us an opportunity to bid on contracts within the university environment and make a commitment to hire some first nations people in the institution—not just as professors, although I think that would be great, because I see myself at some point working in a university as a professor, I hope, if I can eventually get there, but also to work in the cafeteria, the secretarial pool, the gymnasium, the sports field, and to do all of those other jobs outside of the professorships in the university. I think they come to the point of saying, we'll hire some faculty. That's good; we want that. But we represent a significant percentage of Canadian society and we need to be reflected within the halls of post-secondary institutions, not just as faculty but as regular staff members.
We've asked them for a commitment on that front, and they've responded in kind and have said they're going to set some targets and work towards this in the future.
That being said, we don't want them to hire people just because they're first nation; we want them to hire people because they're good, qualified candidates. In order for that to happen, our students need to get to post-secondary education. They need to get to those doors and be successful and move through them. That's the third thing I wanted to say.
The fourth thing I wanted to talk about was the moral responsibility of Canada to ensure that first nations communities do not get left behind. I was talking to Jean earlier, and I had an opportunity in the past to listen to Dr. Janice Stein. Some of the things she talked about struck me as being pertinent to aboriginal society in Canada today. When we look over the last year, we see all of the different conflicts that have exploded around this world. If we look at the riots that occurred in France last year, or the London bombings, we see that these acts were carried out by French and British citizens who felt disenfranchised by the greater society.
I love Canada, by the way. I think it's the most wonderful country in the world to live in. We practise a form of government here. By the way, did you know that democracy is a first nations idea? Did anybody know that? Democracy was first practised in North America. But more important, it has been allowed to grow and blossom on this continent. It has happened in such a way that we now have a segment of society that believes in values—the individual freedoms, the roles and responsibilities of our citizens. When I look around the world, I keep thinking I come from a community where there are 630 jobs and only 300 people who are looking for work. We are an anomaly. We are a first nations anomaly.
I know that because I live in a community called Membertou. Thirty miles away is a sister community called Eskasoni. I love Eskasoni with all my heart. I worked ten years of my life teaching in a high school and working in a drug rehab centre. I like to tell people I spent six years in rehab. I spent ten years of my adult life working in that community. But I also know that they have a big challenge ahead of them in the next twenty years. As first nations are the fastest-growing demographic in Canada, we have the ability to solve Canada's labour woes in the future. We have the numbers. We don't need to go and look elsewhere. We need to look inside and invest in that pool of people.
The CEO for Eskasoni happens to be my first cousin, and we were talking one day about all of the challenges that this community is going to face. He says to me, “You know, the biggest challenge we're going to have twenty years from now is that we are going to have 2,000 people looking for work and they will be between the ages of twenty and forty.” I'm sitting there thinking, “Wow, man, that's a big problem.” Right now there are maybe sixty, eighty jobs in Eskasoni. How are they going to generate another 1,920 to 1,940 in the next twenty years? I said to him, “Good luck, man. I can't help you there. But I'll support you. Whatever you want to do, we'll support you as best we can. And we'll provide our experience in Membertou to help your community find some answers.”
