Thank you, Minister, for coming before the committee. I have a couple of comments on your opening remarks.
First of all, I was quite heartened to see that you were talking about protecting vulnerable populations, so I'm ever hopeful that the government will see fit to make it a priority to address Jordan's principle, once it's passed in the House, and commit to putting first nations children first.
About residential schools, I have just a quick comment. Part of the challenge with the estimates, of course, is that the formatting changes year over year, and it's very difficult to follow the money. That's why sometimes there are misleading stories that come out around estimates.
I, too, want to speak to education, but I'm going to deal with the bricks and mortar part of it. It may just be, again, how you follow the money, but in the analysis the researchers did for us, they said the community infrastructure planned money--and it's on page 2 of the document they prepared for us--the forecast spending for 2006-07, was $1.3 billion, and in 2007-08 it was $1.2 billion.
When we talked about the building of schools in a cost-drivers project that we did on access to information, they talked about the fact that capital and facility maintenance expenditures have actually declined, and that at this stage the per capita expenditure on capital has declined from $1,660 to $1,225, or a 35% decrease in dollars. They are saying that money is moved around in capital expenditures because of these funding shortfalls, making schools a priority.
Interestingly, there was an estimated five-year incremental capital requirement as part of this document, and the overall shortfall over five years was $1.6 billion. In this document--this is a department document, by the way--just in the numbers I was able to add up from here, there was a $202 million shortfall on building schools. Interestingly enough, British Columbia had one of those shortfalls, with a $20 million shortfall for school construction.
Of course, I think we've all heard heartbreaking stories from reserves. Attawapiskat is a good example, where the school has been contaminated. I have Manto Sipi Cree Nation and Mosakahiken Cree Nation, which are just some of a number of places where schools just aren't being dealt with in a timely way.
I guess my question to you is that with the community infrastructure dollars going down, I didn't see anything in the supplementary estimates to reflect the need for new school construction. So I wonder how you plan on addressing how many schools need to be built or expanded or renovated to meet the government's own stated goals about K to 12 being a priority in education.