Thank you.
I'm sorry the minister is not still here. I'm finding it a little difficult to listen to the minister telling us we shouldn't make negative comments so that we don't hurt the people who are involved. I sat in my early days as a member of Parliament while he voted against every land claims agreement piece of legislation that came before us, namely the Nisga'a treaty and the Nunavut land claims implementation legislation, so it's a little difficult for me to take those kinds of comments coming from that particular minister. I want to put these on record, because we have to put them in perspective. Your history always comes back to put you in your place, I think.
I look at the supplementary estimates and notice that there are a lot of transfers. I know the minister said they're spending more money in the Indian Affairs department than any previous government. I'm not going to get into nickel-and-diming this stuff, but what I'm interested in is how much of the supposed increase in actual spending on services is related to transferring of different services from other departments to Indian Affairs.
I made comments before about Aboriginal Business Canada transferring from Industry Canada and about other services managed by different departments moving to Indian Affairs. I remember my comments to the previous minister, that in a way we're almost ghettoizing services in Indian Affairs.
I wonder how much of that money is actually for transferring over to INAC and how much of it is for the salaries of the people who went with the transfer, and not so much as an end result of services going to the people this department serves. That's a little worrisome for me. And how much of that money is really for the International Polar Year, above and beyond the money we use for service delivery, whether for education or land claims or whatever?
I'm worried that the actual dollars they're saying have increased the spending for the Department of Indian Affairs are really money spent on the International Polar Year, or money taken from Industry Canada for Aboriginal Business Canada, and not so much money for the delivery of services, which I think is what we all want to see.