Labour market development. The aboriginal and human resource development agreements have been in our communities for a long time. I can't tell you about the other communities, but in the Métis community more women than men have accessed those resources, so they have provided a tremendous amount of support toward getting women some education.
The problem with those agreements is this. It's a one-year intervention to help support them in getting employment. A one-year intervention doesn't really even get you a diploma in a post-secondary institution. It's a limited intervention to get them a limited job. Many of them might move from an $8-an-hour job to an $11-an-hour job, but in the marketplace and economics that exist today, $11 an hour still doesn't pay the rent. Our community is even experiencing kids at 30 who are not leaving home. They can't afford to leave home. They can't afford to grow up and move away, and that's because an $11-an-hour job will not get them where they need to be.
So if we're going to provide educational supports, I think we need to look at educational supports. I believe the reason women have accessed them more is that it marginalizes them, and they're accustomed to being marginalized. Most women get $800 a month in training dollars when they go to a post-secondary institution, and then they get a certain amount, about $200 per month per child, over and above that--but I could be wrong. For instance, an average person who might have two or three children will have to live on a training allowance of $1,200 to $1,500 a month. Many times that hardly pays the rent, never mind buy groceries or pay for day care. In the Métis communities, we don't get day care dollars over and above. Child care is not an increased amount of money.
It is very challenging, and we make it really difficult. If there were more supports put in place--and we need more than one-year interventions, because traditionally in women's work...and I know we don't encourage our women to go into traditional women's work, but they generally are prone to going into things like home care service or child care or social work. Even for our social workers, it's usually youth work because they can't afford to get a bachelor of social work degree, so they are limited in the kinds of jobs they can get. We need to provide more supports so they can get a degree education or an undergraduate education, so they can go out and earn a good income so they can survive. They have more than the intellectual ability to do it.