One of the issues of creating the sustainable funding profiles is the idea of finding aboriginal organizations that will take this on, or creating those organizations.
The aboriginal community has little in the way of civil society. Most of the services we access are accessed through some sort of political body. If you go to a typical first nations community, you will find—and you know this, I'm sure, from other presentations—that most of the employment will be from the band itself. It's not unusual to have as many as one in 10 people run for public office whenever there's an election. You have everything, including businesses, journalists, and programs, all embedded within the band government.
It's one way to manage things, but there's nowhere that's non-political for aboriginal people to turn to for services and supports just like the rest of Canadians. We can go down to the Cancer Society if our parent has cancer, and then we can access information. We know it's not a government service. It's there for the support of cancer and cancer survivors.
What we need to do is regenerate what was decimated around the same time as the Aboriginal Healing Foundation closed. Most of the national aboriginal organizations that were non-political, such as the National Aboriginal Health Organization, the First Nations Statistical Institute, and all of these types of organizations were managed by and governed by aboriginal people, but they were for direct service provision to aboriginal communities, and they were apolitical. They were all done away with at the same time and often within a few months. It represents a strata of aboriginal society that was gone virtually overnight.
If we were to re-establish some type of program where aboriginal people can govern their own services, and which did not have to have the blessing of political bodies...certainly there would be liaison, but not everything in the world is run through our MPs, and not every health service is run through our MPPs.
Can you imagine a system where I had to go to my MPP in order to make sure I got adequate health service? It makes very little sense, but that is the world that is faced by most aboriginal citizens.