Thank you, Chair.
I have to say that when I found out that the next report, at our next hearing, was going to be on indigenous people, I thought, “Please be a good report. Please”, because I'm out of options. I've already gone ballistic. What do you do after that? Now...it's just so sad.
Here's my concern. It would have been a lot easier, as a member of the premier oversight committee of Parliament, to understand if it were one department that just continuously couldn't get its act together. I took some comfort in thinking it was a problem child, it was a challenging ministry, and that we were just not getting it right there.
However, now we have a completely different ministry with the same kinds of results. At some point you start thinking the unthinkable. If it's not the department, is it the subject matter? When you are immersed in enough of this, you begin to understand some of the frustration that exists in the indigenous community, why Romeo did what he did, and why an honourable man like him would say what he said in that place.
The Auditor General, in his spring report and his message to us, said it was “the incomprehensible failure of the federal government”—and that's not just this one, but all of them—“to influence better conditions for Indigenous people in Canada. Our recent audits are two more in a long line that bring to light the poor outcomes of Indigenous programs.” Here's another one in the same year.
We can go only so long believing that these kinds of things can build up and build up and that there's not going to be a reaction at some point. I said before that if I were a young indigenous person faced with the history of what has happened to my people over all these decades, let alone the treaties and everything else, given the way I am, I'm thinking I can give a good guess where I'd be on this subject. How long are you going to keep me contained and quiet when this kind of stuff is still going on?
I realize I'm going on, but I don't know what else to do. We ask detailed questions. We get angry. We plead. We think it's one department, and still we come back to the Auditor General's...and I think he phrased it so well, “the incomprehensible failure of the federal government to influence better conditions for Indigenous people in Canada.”
We go to this report. I like to look at the focus of the report, as stated in paragraph 6.12 on page 3:
This audit focused on whether Employment and Social Development Canada managed the Aboriginal Skills and Employment Training Strategy and the Skills and Partnership Fund to increase the number of Indigenous people getting jobs and staying employed.
Right above that, the Auditor General says, “The Department is responsible for monitoring the agreement holders' use of program funds,” and yet, in his opening remarks, the Auditor General also had to say “the Department did not consistently monitor Indigenous organizations to ensure that they fulfilled their obligations under funding agreements”, blah, blah, blah.
The key thing that was supposed to happen in this program was monitoring, and you failed. Once again, why? Why, why, why do we have consistent failure when it comes to our indigenous sisters and brothers? Why?