Speaking only for my community, I am five hours north of Saskatoon in Saskatchewan, so accessing educational institutes was a big factor in my having to leave my community to go out to get an education.
Also, I come from a family of 11 brothers and sisters, all of whom had to leave their reserve to go out to get an education, and most of them haven't come back because there are not enough jobs in the communities and there are just not enough resources within each first nation to retain a lot of the people who go out and get an education.
A lot of us would like to go back and serve our communities, right in our home communities, but because where I am in Prince Albert is a centralized location, and I have to be where the position is.
Also, with regard to the lack of resources available to a lot of reserve communities, a lot of them would succeed more if there were, for example, more university education courses or even trade schools within our communities. For example, Pelican Narrows is a community of over 3,000 people, but there is only high school there.
Sometimes we have programs that come in from time to time, but there's nothing solid, concrete, and nothing long-term like a two-year diploma program or a four-year college education. We all have to leave for that.
If you think maybe it's easy to leave, I would just ask if any one of you would go to one of our reserves for four years to go to school. The culture shock would be quite a bit different and stark.
I think it is very important that we expand education in all communities going forward. The more educated a population you have, the better it is for everybody.
I just want to throw this out there. I know that oftentimes dollars are a factor in educating people, but think about it this way. If you provide four years of university education to any one person, the Government of Canada gets back over 40 years of a tax-paying, productive member of society, so that's a good investment, not just in first nations but in all of Canada.
Thank you.