This obviously is a very important program that the department runs. What we focused on was that the objective of this program was to help indigenous people find sustainable and meaningful employment. We feel that if a program has an objective like that—“sustainable and meaningful”—then there needs to be a way to measure whether the people who participated in the program ended up getting sustainable and meaningful employment. That's why we raise concerns about saying that.... If somebody ended up with a job but it was maybe a part-time job and maybe it didn't last very long, is that really sustainable and meaningful?
The starting point to understand the success of the program is to go back and look at those terms. If that's what the program's intended to achieve, sustainable and meaningful employment, what is sustainable employment, what is meaningful employment, and then how do we track it all the way through?
That's our fundamental concern here. There's a critical objective to this program, and it's really important that the department be able to measure it. Again, if you look at the overall numbers and you see the unemployment levels are higher for this group than the rest of the population, and those numbers don't change, then you wonder whether the program is actually having an impact or not. Without having some measurement for sustainable and meaningful employment, it's not really possible to say what type of an impact the program is having.