Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I'll add, just very briefly, to what my colleague, Mr. LeBlanc, has said.
As he mentioned, the primary role of the department has been with respect to on-reserve education, given its responsibilities for activities on reserve. Off reserve, the provincial governments are the administrators of the education system, so the department doesn't have any direct program role at this point in off-reserve education.
But as Mr. LeBlanc mentioned, there is a very important percentage of aboriginal people who live off reserve, in cities in particular, whose educational outcomes are equally important I think to making progress on the aboriginal file overall and whose statistics are relatively similar to those of the aboriginal students on reserve. So provinces, in particular over the past year or two, have expressed an increasing interest in trying to work with the federal government, within provincial systems. The thinking is not of duplicating the on-reserve system off reserve, but rather of working with provinces to try to improve areas in which the federal government can help education outcomes for aboriginal learners off reserve.
There are a number of important best practices that provinces have developed. It's an area of increasing interest to them in terms of the role that aboriginal people in particular can play in provincial economies. So I think there are some promising initiatives that are being considered, some of which are in place in the off-reserve situation.
We're certainly giving some consideration to ways in which the federal government may be able to help. That's pretty well where we are on that aspect.
I should just say, in terms of the role of my office, for those who may not be familiar with it, that the minister actually wears two hats. He's Minister of Indian Affairs and he's federal interlocutor. The interlocutor role was developed in the mid-eighties, as a point of entry into the federal government for Métis, non-status people, but obviously, it didn't become a full department with program funding and so on. This is a little bit of context of the role that my office plays.
I'll stop there because I'm sure the members will want to ask questions, and I'll be happy to answer them. Thank you.