Thanks, Mrs. Atwin, for your service as an educator.
You're absolutely right, and I fully believe that education is the key that unlocks generational poverty. As someone who was first in my family to graduate with a post-secondary education, it's near and dear to my heart.
I hear two things from communities. One, there is a recognition that there is improved funding for students by 70% since 2015. Let's be clear that we're not talking about 10% or 20% more, but 70% more, on average. We are now at provincial comparability.
However, I also hear that there are still gaps in learning because of the gap having been so neglected for so long. I was talking about a decade of darkness. That was a decade of lost multiple generations of students, who were not funded comparably to their provincial systems and who fell behind. In fact, not only were those school systems not funded; institutes who helped first nations do things like gather data were also defunded. They were starved of the resources they needed so that first nations themselves could make good decisions about how to move forward on education.
What I'm hearing is, “Please, let's not go back there.” We need long-term agreements that are going to solidify this funding so that we never again see a government cut funding for indigenous education or cut funding for indigenous infrastructure or cut funding for indigenous water or all the things that we saw in complete, decrepit decay when we took office in 2015. It's a lot of work and a lot of financial commitment, but first nations communities are doing that work with us. I can tell you that there is a groundswell of change happening. What people fear the most is a return to the past. They fear that if our government isn't around and a Conservative government is elected, they're going to lose those gains.
Quite frankly, Mrs. Atwin, that's why we're working on long-term agreements with first nations, so that they have the runway, the autonomy and the sufficiency of funding to make sure we don't end up in that place again.