Thank you, Chair.
Thank you both for being here today and for the work you've done on this.
You quoted from your executive summary the fact that financial resources allocated to providing indigenous services increased significantly over this period of 2015-16 to 2022-23. You went on to talk about the quantitative and the qualitative component of your report.
For a couple of minutes, I want to just drill into the quantitative part, and I'll come back later and hit some of the qualitative stuff.
Just doing a little bit of looking on my own, if you go back to the 2015-16 and a little bit prior to that even, the range of spending on indigenous affairs, which was through INAC back then, was in the range of $7.5 billion to $9 billion over those three years, and by the time we get to 2021-22 that number is about $29 billion. The supplementary estimates (C) for 2023 say that number is $58 billion, and the main estimates for 2023-24 start the process for next year at $49 billion.
In that same time frame, the number of FTEs has increased from about 4,500 to what we're projecting now, about 9,200 for the coming fiscal year.
These are really big numbers and these are really big changes. In the context of the quantitative component of your analysis, can you just speak to the significance or the magnitude of these changing numbers?
Then I have a follow-up on some other parts I want to talk about.