Sarah wants to say something, but before we do that I wanted to note that the Supreme Court of Canada had very clearly said that whether an aboriginal person lives on reserve or if they go out of reserve, they're still aboriginal people and still entitled to the support of the federal government, which has a fiduciary responsibility for aboriginal people across this country--at least still.
I know that the Kelowna accord was going to hand over certain health, housing, and education responsibilities into the hands of aboriginal people. Would that have helped you in any way? Is that a mechanism that would work, or is it another terrible mechanism that's just going to put forward a fourth level of somebody doing diddly squat?
To me it sounds like we're caught between a lack of a mechanism and a lack of some kind of process in which aboriginal people can have access to the things they need. The role of the federal government, as far as I'm concerned, is that the federal government has a fiduciary responsibility for aboriginal people. So to have to dump aboriginal people in cities, right in the middle, and look at the province and say you are supposed to look after that and you are supposed to look after that, I don't get that.
Nunavut was a totally different issue because they had responsibility for themselves, but in Labrador City we heard that there was this jurisdictional thing getting out of hand. The only people falling between the cracks at this point in time are the aboriginal people, and their needs.
So give me a mechanism here that we can sink our teeth into.