Mr. Speaker, I want to be somewhat kind but one of the things about aboriginal affairs is that it is not a simple matter. To come into this place and make the statement that in the last 40 years there has been no progress with first nations people, all I can say is that if we have spent a significant amount of time in the communities we are able to see the improvements, as slow as they might have been.
I will give one example to verify that. In the early seventies, when the Prime Minister was the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, there was no program for post-secondary education for aboriginal students. Today, there are 27,000 children getting post-secondary education every year. That is a vast improvement over virtually no students getting post-secondary education when the Prime Minister created that new program. That is just an example of how off the mark the member is.
Let me get on with explaining to the member what I said in my speech in case he missed some of the points. The Indian Act itself is being replaced by one process and another and another and another. Those processes are the following. In 1999, under Minister Irwin and the present Minister of Human Resources Development, we passed a bill called the First Nations Land Management Act to take land use planning out of the Indian Act and allow first nations people to develop their own land use planning, which is a prerequisite for building an economy, as those of us who have been municipal leaders at one time know. Of course we have now brought in the first nations governance act to look at elections, financial administration and administration of governance in order to look at conflict of interest, transparency and the kinds of issues that we all take for granted as government in this place. We are also moving forward with fiscal institutions, which I mentioned to the member, which allows first nations to develop their own economies by collecting tax and/or real property tax in their own communities. That is a prerequisite for any government at whatever level.
These are the changes we are making to the outdated Indian Act, which we think will make an improvement in the lives of first nations people.