Thank you very much for coming to present to us.
I appreciate very much your speaking to us in your own language--one that I don't understand. I understand very much how important that is to your culture and identity, but I would go further and say it is important to the survival of the people of Nunavut. I see that reflected in what Mr. Berger wrote on the importance of recognizing the need for support for bilingual education in Nunavut. It's important to your identity, but also to the identity of young people who have to see themselves as having an important language.
Bilingual education seems to be key to this whole notion of a partnership. I agree with you that the key to effective assertion of Arctic sovereignty lies in the partnership between the Inuit and the Government of Canada. I supported the creation of Nunavut in the legislature of Newfoundland and Labrador on April 1, 1999. I joined in recognizing and celebrating the creation of Nunavut, as I did a few years later on the creation of Nunatsiavut in Labrador, which translates as “our beautiful land”. I guess it's a take-off on Nunavut. So that's very important to the future of Canada. I know that in 1993 the Inuit actually ceded the aboriginal title to Canada, thus giving Canada the sovereignty it can now assert. So it's extremely important that we as Canadians follow through on that in good faith, and I'm very disappointed to hear that's not happening.
In Mr. Berger's letter in his report on the Nunavut project, he said that an ambitious program of bilingual education that would allow graduates in Nunavut to be able to speak in Inuktitut and English and participate fully in government and society would cost approximately $20 million per year. It's a lot of money if you don't have it. But in the Canadian context it doesn't seem like a lot of money when military exercises in the Arctic probably cost millions of dollars a year.
Do you expect the Government of Canada to support bilingual education in Nunavut in the same way as it supports bilingual education in French and English elsewhere? Is that something you support, and are you making any progress in getting the Government of Canada to adopt that?