Thank you for that important question, MP Idlout.
The first part of it is funding. Eighty per cent of participating communities in the collective undertake an immersion program, only to be faced with walls because there isn't enough funding to build the program before the teacher enters the classroom. They need assessments, lesson plans, a curriculum and somebody with skills to coordinate all of that. They're out there, but you have to compete and pay them properly to do the work.
The second and most important piece is this: We have the speakers. They're not OCT-qualified, but they can provide that conversational, immersive language—which is what our young kids need—quite easily, with the support of a teacher. That type of funding is just not available in this current interim funding approach.
There's a real need, here, to take advantage of what I'll call this last decade of fluent speakers. I believe we've seen the model. Renee talked about it. If you give that conversational language to children in grade 1, 2, 3 or 4, or in kindergarten or earlier, the dying of a language goes away. That, to me, is an investment. You're going to get far more return on a dollar spent in a first nations school that offers immersion, and real change happening in language recovery.
Meegwetch.