Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Winnipeg South has given me the opportunity to add a point that I should have made in my speech.
It is true that the plight of the urban aboriginal, the off reserve aboriginal person, is the most desperate. Even what paltry support mechanism they may have had in their home communities is often not available to them when they move off reserve. They often get lost in the inner cities.
One of the heartening things about the Kelowna meetings was that the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, which represents off reserve aboriginal peoples, and the Métis National Council were represented at the table and were given equal status to first nations and Inuit people. We took some comfort in that it was not only the provincial and territorial leaders who were with the prime minister around that table, but the Native Women's Association of Canada, the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, the Métis National Council and the Assembly of First Nations were represented.
In retrospect, it was almost a miracle to get those diverse interests together in one room for a common purpose. I am really reluctant to let that slip away. Even though I often accuse the Liberal Party, I heard the former minister of Indian affairs outline the steps that got us to Kelowna. It sounded that exactly what was wrong with the whole administration managing poverty, I call it, of Indian affairs is that it goes around and around to round tables that lead nowhere, to more studies, et cetera. That all seemed to stop at Kelowna when a collective enlightenment, a kind of collective consciousness dominated the room. Everybody was bobbing their heads at once saying, “You are right. The time has come. No more debate. No more prizes for predicting rain. The prize is only for building arks”.