With regard to the Anishinabek one, we may want to send you detailed information because I'm not sure that I have all the details on the implementation of the self-government at this stage.
As for MK—because I'm not linguistically good; you heard my French already—we have a few of them in the country that are, for us—how can I say it?—guiding our actions. They're basically what inspires us in our day-to-day life and in our work. The other one, of course, is the First Nations Health Authority in B.C.
In some cases, it's the first nations under the 10-year grants who are taking control of their funding. MK, as you mentioned, in 20 years closed the gap, and in some aspects they're doing better than the general population in the Atlantic provinces. As you mentioned, even though some people sometimes contest it, that is because it's managed by first nations for first nations.
I met recently with the Cree of Quebec on other issues, and you can see the kind of progress that first nations are making when they actually make the decisions for themselves. That's why, for us, it's a model. That's why I said that the objective of my department is to become obsolete. I say to the staff on a regular basis that we are a species at risk that is looking for its own extinction. The way that it's going to happen cannot be directed from the centre. It's going to be different from place to place, but those are the models that inspire us.
NAN in the north of Ontario is an interesting one. We're doing some work in northern Ontario on health, on what we call “health transformation”. There's work being done in Quebec on health and social services. What we want everywhere, without imposing a model, is to say to the ones who want to take it up, “Let's do it.”
With regard to education, one thing that we've been doing is focusing on the funding formula because if you want to take over the education system, you need to make sure that you have a sufficient amount of money to manage it. We have been developing this formula, which was not easy, in co-development with first nations. It actually provides comparability with provinces, plus funding for some aspects that are not in the provincial formula. As soon as we have the funding formula, the funding, what we say to the first nation is, “Now do you want to take it and how?” MK becomes a model. It's not the only one. Some will say they're not ready to go that far. As you know, some nations would not necessarily work at this regional level, but others, of course, are looking at it.
We see it now becoming more and more evident. The First Nations Health Authority is inspiring people in northern Ontario and people in Quebec, but their solutions will probably be different at the end.