Thank you. I hope we'll see it in our lifetime, but I think the system has to be dismantled.
I have thousands and thousands of pages of access to information documents to figure out how this system could be as dysfunctional as it is. I have it all back to Duncan Campbell Scott's notes on ripping off the Cree people after signing Treaty No. 9. In all the years, from the 1920s and Duncan Campbell Scott to the Pierre Trudeau government, all the documents right up to today, I've never, ever once seen a bureaucrat say they were really concerned about the children, never once.
Now, they're good people. They do good work. They're soccer moms and soccer dads. But it seems that the system from the beginning was focused on downloading the costs so the feds didn't have to pay—that's what they did in the residential schools and that's what they're still doing in education—limiting liability of government, and negating treaty obligations. The people who are running the education and health systems are not educators. They don't have backgrounds in schooling. So we have a non-system, federally, unlike the provincial systems. In the provincial systems, everything is done for the benefit of the children.
Can we even reform this system? You speak so well about the need to take control of education. How can we reform a non-system as opposed to taking the power away from the bureaucrats who are trying to limit their own responsibilities and liabilities? How do we transform it so that the communities and the families and the parents are in charge of making the decisions about what is best for the well-being of young people?