Your question is important. You need to have specific things in mind when talking about skills development. In terms of skills development, it's not really that complicated. What actually is a skill?
Well, it is a gap or something missing in someone, such as a lack of self-esteem. You say that everything flows from self-esteem, but I don't think so. Self-esteem is a consequence of the historic wrongs suffered by the Aboriginal peoples. It is only an outcome.
And let's talk about skills development. Let's look at your example of a work certificate. You say that one of the current micro-issues is that a certificate received in an Aboriginal community is not transferable to somewhere else. So, people can't go and work outside their community. But the problem is the example itself. First of all, skills development is an individual action. Since 1990, commissions of inquiry have been telling us that individual actions are not yielding any results. What is needed are collective actions. We have to take a comprehensive approach to the problem, rather than chipping away at it in pieces. I would like to use your example to explain the risks associated with this.
I am an Aboriginal person and I have a work certificate which is valid within the geographic confines of my community. We also need to think about what is going to happen if that certificate is valid outside the community. Outside the community, Aboriginal people are serious victims of racism and discrimination. As a result, Aboriginal Canadians are rarely interested in leaving their community. Just take a look at what's happening in communities in the North, in major urban centres like Val-d'Or. It's total discrimination. Aboriginal people are also telling us that they want to work for their own people. Indeed, Trudeau's white paper clearly showed that the Aboriginal people have always refused, throughout their history, to empty their communities.
If certificates that allow an Aboriginal person to be exiled from his community become a reality, what effect will that have? Well, it will result in a massive exile of community members, massive urbanization, and ultimately, the assimilation of Aboriginal people in the urban environment. It will result in a cultural loss. In an urban environment, people will not be in contact with their culture. It is terrible for an Aboriginal man, for example, to have to leave his nation and his extended family, when we know that their relational systems operate primarily on the basis of extended families. Providing for a work certificate to be valid outside the community also makes for a break with the individual's cultural identity. Aboriginal people will never be interested in that kind of measure—never, and I understand why.