Thank you, member. It's a very important question.
It's one that the Parliamentary Budget Officer asked when he did his review of first nations schools. So we'll make it a particular concern of ours following on your colleague's mention. We'll send you a copy of that report.
What they found is that there was no clear process inside the aboriginal affairs department for deciding which communities receive schools and which do not. That was one of his central recommendations, that there need to be some kind of clear criteria set out.
He found that 50 communities needed schools. As you may know, in Thunder Bay, for example, many first nations children, including some as young as 13, are having to fly down from their communities to go to school . I have an 18-year-old at home and I think many of us have kids. We don't even want to see them going away at 18, let alone at 13. They're getting into at-risk behaviours.
Twenty nine others need substantial repairs, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer. Even in communities where there are good quality schools, the estimate is that there is underfunding in the basic formula for education—for teachers, libraries, and those types of things—by $2,000 to $3,000 per student per year.
Despite that, in some areas both the teachers and schools are able to do good work. But I think you can agree with me that good public policy is when success is the rule and not the exception. So we need to bring everybody up to that basic standard of equity and I think that it would be worth it for the government to look into how these schools are actually allocated. What are the criteria? How do we ensure that they're going to those most in need?
I think that's a very important question.
