Thank you.
I noted four questions—and I'll see if I can move through these quickly, Mr. Chair. I noticed the look.
The difference between the two figures is pretty straightforward: it's the activity of other departments. Parliament gives Indian and Northern Affairs in the order of $6 billion. I think we'll end up this year at about $6.4 billion, something like that. The difference between that and the $9 billion is basically the money that Parliament gives to other departments, the largest chunk being the non-insured health benefits that flow through the Department of Health. That figure, if my note here is right, is about $1.8 billion. Human Resources and Skills Development has about $400 million, and they got some more yesterday for the aboriginal skills and employment partnership programs. The next biggest one is probably CMHC, for their housing programs. They spend somewhere in the order of $300 million a year for housing, which you can identify as aboriginal housing.
And it goes on. There's a whole bunch of other things, including Justice Canada, which got some more money yesterday, the Public Health Agency, Industry Canada, Canadian Heritage, and so on.
In order to help Parliament keep track of that, the Treasury Board Secretariat has kept a sort of inventory or framework. It's on the Treasury Board website, and we make reference to it in our reports to Parliament. That's the famous figure of $9.1 billion that you keep hearing. They're in the process of updating that to another fiscal year, and it'll probably end up being, I don't know, $9.2 billion or $9.3 billion. But that's the difference, basically; the $3 billion involves the other departments.
In terms of ghettoizing or, on the flip side, mainstreaming into other departments, that's a choice governments will have to make. It has gone back and forth over the years. There probably is a selfish reason not to expand too far—that is, there's only so much one minister or one poor deputy minister can keep an eye on. Plus there are efficiencies in having more specialized purposes.
I tend to agree with what I think you're saying, that if Health Canada is really good at health issues, and HRSD is really good at skills and employment and so on, we shouldn't try to replicate that in the department. But what I think we can do—and do, I assure you—is be an advocate for aboriginal issues and sensitivities.
I have people out there as antennae every day, attending interdepartmental meetings and working with other departments. If we see an opportunity to take an initiative or a program or a regulation that's in the works and make it work better for aboriginal peoples—by changing the design a little bit, or setting some resources away—then we go to bat for that time and time again. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we don't. But I do agree that we have to do both. We have to have a strong centre of expertise and responsibility and we have to try to mainstream it into the roles of other departments.
In terms of how to count spending, I'm not sure there's a right or a wrong way to present it. You can get into debates about what is spending for aboriginal people or for first nations people. We can certainly account for a good piece of it, because it flows through our programs to first nations recipients. Those are the core numbers you tend to see bandied about. And they're significant resources when you take that $9 billion and divide it by the recipient population, but you're also quite right to say that first nations Canadians benefit from old age security or guaranteed income supplement or the fact that there's a national defence department or whatever. They're Canadian citizens as well. So you can get yourself into some attribution and methodology issues.
But to go back to where your colleague was, there is a special federal responsibility for first nations peoples and for aboriginal peoples in the general sense. We have subsection 91(24) responsibilities, we do have the Indian Act, we do have honour of the Crown responsibilities with regard to claims and settlements. So there is in fact a stream of money that Parliament provides specifically for first nations peoples, and I guess our job is to manage it and account for it.