I think the three-year multi-year funding is perhaps.... For the government, that may seem like a long period of time for a pilot project, but in fact it is too short, because for the women who are finishing the courses, there is no dedicated paid staff to take care of them. If the project had been even five years long--hindsight is twenty-twenty, I guess--maybe two years of the project could have been dedicated solely to helping people who had gone through the program. If I were to do it again, I would put in those two years of research, but we didn't do that.
We also learned about community-based programming. If we'd had the courses in the communities where the women live instead of bringing them in from all over the Northwest Territories.... Their families were very supportive of them and it kind of excluded that day care situation, but then we ran into the next problem, which was that, okay, the mémères and the dads would take care of the kids to allow them to take their training, but who takes care of them after that? We have a few women, especially in Trout Lake, where they're doing a lot of work, and they have nowhere to put the kids because there's no day care.
We've been trying our best to figure it out. Maybe we could suggest some kind of cooperative program in the community, but as it sits, only x number of people live there, so some work and some take care of the old people and the kids.