Thank you.
Good afternoon to the members of the committee.
As Ed said, Little Salmon Carmacks First Nation and other self-governing indigenous governments have been working together with Canada on updating Canada's fiscal policy on self-government and building out what expenditure is needed for various areas of responsibility, including indigenous languages.
Our work over the last couple of years has been in building a model of expenditure for what is needed on the ground by these indigenous governments to support their language. As Ed mentioned, with very few remaining speakers, the focus is on immediate and focused immersion-type approaches that will pass the language from the remaining speakers to a new generation.
These are intensive programs, such as full-time adult immersion done in cohorts of about 10 people, preschool language nests for young children, mentor-apprentice programs for more one on one, intensive learning and silent speaker support for people who understand the language but don't speak it actively.
In building the expenditure need model, we looked at assessing what is needed to implement those programs on the ground in a way that they're effective. We looked at existing examples. We looked at the realities on the ground in the communities. We identified what we think base capacities are that are needed to put those programs into practice, what incremental capacity might be needed as the population of the community increases and there's more demand on those programs, what some of the operational costs are that are involved in doing things like on-the-land learning, learning through cultural activities and what resources are needed for creating multimedia tools in support of that learning. All of this was built into the expenditure need model.
As I mentioned, this is all part of the work with the federal fiscal policy process, and we're working with Canada, the Department of Canadian Heritage and CIRNA to put forward a proposal for a phased implementation of this model that allows the indigenous governments to build up their capacity over time.