The amount of money is not sufficient; $23 million is nothing. Divide it up across the country and you have nothing. The question, as I understand it, was how can we better appropriate the funding to realize some results. Number one, stop the $10,000 to $20,000. They have denied totally the cost of administration. So my question was, do we run it out of the parking lot? I think there needs to be a national strategy and a coming together. We did have the aboriginal women's summit, which nobody seems to know about or read about. I don't think it's even been brought to the attention of Parliament, although it was hosted by the premier of Newfoundland and the premier of B.C.
I think there is a mechanism, which I would love to be a part of, to assess the long-term value and the long-term progress that needs to be made. But I must say I liked the ideas that have come before me, which is a national campaign, national awareness, national acknowledgement of the aboriginal women in this country—who are brilliant, by the way. I hope and pray that you will read my presentation, because we have done that. We have the Esquao awards. Esquao is a beautiful Cree word for “woman”, which has been stylized, and we honour our women. But we are very different in our honouring. We have no jury. The communities nominate the women and we honour them. It has created such goodwill in this province among the women because there isn't one woman in this province who will not be honoured. If their community, or their mother, or their son, or their father nominates them, they will be honoured. So they get their 15 minutes of fame on television.
I would love to be part of a campaign to bring this forward to the Canadian people, because we also have social justice awards in which we have honoured, for instance, Irene Khan, who was the secretary general of Amnesty International, who did what we couldn't do, which is bring the issue of the deaths of aboriginal women to the international scene.
There are exciting ways to address this issue. The incidents are horrific, but that does not mean that we cannot progress in this country and make it welcoming to aboriginal women.