I think the solution here, or the opportunity for me to make change, really comes back to the community. It comes back to our indigenous communities, where many of the systems are broken. To really make change here, there are going to have to be cross-jurisdictional changes within the system. If you look at our communities, there is a substantial amount of poverty. As soon as you have poverty, there is a direct relation to incarceration and laws being broken.
Really, you have to look at the root of the problem where, as I said before, there is colonialism, the legacy of the residential school system. We have to intervene somewhere. My purview involves the economic development of many of our communities, where we're fully involved with the resources and the development of many of our economies in our communities, which provides more resources to prevent many of these issues from happening, and it provides more resources so we can bring many of our children back to their communities.
Right now, the children in the foster child care system outnumber the residential school system number at its highest point. We have to get those children back to their communities to prevent many of these issues from happening.
Part of the solution, too, is education. There needs to be culturally appropriate education for our children, not only in the public school system but back in our communities. If we see graduation rates as low as 40%, compared to 80% to 90% for the general population, there is a problem. If we see children are not graduating or are not fulfilling their obligations as learners within the public school system, perhaps the public school system is the problem.
Really, as soon as you open this box, you see that there are many problems with this whole system. As you look at this Pandora's box and start scraping the surface, you can see what the problems are within the system of not only provincial jurisdiction, but also federal jurisdiction.
What I would say is to make changes. Look at all those issues related to economic development, education, and the ability for our children to participate in alternative places, such as being involved in sports, which is a big deterrent to having our children or our young teenagers incarcerated.
If you look at the North American Indigenous Games, which took place recently in Toronto—and I just found this out yesterday from Grand Chief Wilton Littlechild, who is one of the writers of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples—you will see that six months before the games and six months after the games there was a definite decrease in the number of offences in some of our communities. I think that's really telling in regard to our children having the opportunities to participate. That's one of the success stories of the North American Indigenous Games and other things we need to do.
In the next three years, that's what I would like to see.