We are talking about skills, and it seems to me that people who have been in prison are already labelled. When they return to the community, employers do a check to assess their credibility and find out whether they have committed robbery, for example. There are inquiries made, so that employers know whether an applicant has committed a crime. Any applicant who has been involved in robberies will obviously be convinced that an employer will never hire him.
That's why people who have been in prison very often think that their only recourse is to continue to do what they were doing before, rather than try to develop skills. Despite that, they are labelled and they very often wear that label for the rest of their lives. We are only able to rescue a few of them. And here I am not talking only about Aboriginal communities; this is the case for everyone who lives in that environment. Some manage to escape, but most of them continue to suffer the consequences.
Before placing people in these environments, we should work with them and try to ascertain the skills they could acquire and some way for them to restore their dignity, or see how we could help them to live better in today's society while still respecting them for what they are. If we work with people on the ground, in their environment—with people who are part and parcel of their communities, in Quebec, Canada and elsewhere in the world—we will succeed.
In terms of child protection and family services, children are placed in foster homes, but we don't work with either the children or the family. When the children are returned to the family, no work has been done. What happens then? Well, the cycle starts all over again. Right now, we are trying to do the opposite. The Aboriginal communities have asked the government to consider their vision, so that it is possible to develop close relations with communities and families, and work directly with the parents to help them fulfill their responsibilities to their children. The goal is not for children to be placed in foster homes or, under the new regulations, that they be taken from their communities again and adopted by other societies.
So, there is a great deal of work to be done with respect to individual responsibility and dignity. We very often forget those things. It is easier to move people around and camp them in specific places than it is to work with them. It is easier to put people in institutions than to work directly with the communities to try and help them.