Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I want to thank the witnesses for coming today.
There are a couple of points I wanted to touch on.
First of all, I want to acknowledge that I think most of you, in one way or another, have talked about the success of your programs. In fact, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada had an evaluation done that talked about the success of your programs. I just wanted to put that on the record.
The second piece of it is, and referring to Ms. Dion Stout... “Out of the Shadows At Last” actually had a couple of very good sections on access to programming. It was identified that there were problems with equity of access to federal government programming, yet what had been proposed is that the Aboriginal Healing Foundation programming will be replaced by something from Health Canada, which we already know is patchwork and often inaccessible.
The second piece from the “Out of the Shadows at Last” report that I wanted to touch on was that they strongly talked about the renewal of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation. Ms. Rigsby-Jones touched on the economics of what we measure. In this report--now this is 2004--they specifically said that for every $2 spent on the community holistic healing circle program at Hollow Water--one place they were citing--the federal and provincial governments save $6 to $16 on incarceration fees. So every $2 of investments they have on community healing, they save $6 to $16 in 2004 dollars.
I'll start with Ms. Rigsby-Jones, and then the rest of you can jump in. You've clearly outlined the fact that the benefits of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation programs are about the fact that it's community-driven. Everything that we've looked at from Health Canada is individually driven. There are complicated processes. There are treatment plans. There are all these kinds of things that an individual may have to submit. So I wonder if you could comment on what you think will happen to individuals who are currently accessing community-driven programs when they can only deal with Health Canada programs.