Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the point of view of my colleague from Yukon. His question reminded me of how often I have met elderly aboriginal men and women who have come home to their communities to retire and who have spent much of their lives working in Toronto, or in construction in Chicago. I think members will find that many first nation aboriginal people have gone away to work in other areas of prosperity in times past.
Somehow there has been a big time gap in that process, for whatever number of reasons we might imagine. My colleague is absolutely right. We not only want our aboriginal youth to get the training they deserve to become complete members of the workforce. We need them to get that education and to become members of the workforce.
I and my colleagues have seen numbers in the forecasts, which indicate that in an array of economic sectors, the shortfall in the labour pool, the number of people able to fill those positions, is vast, in some cases tens of thousands of positions. We not only want our aboriginal people to participate, we need them to participate.
As to the comprehensive claims, just as we need to face head-on the specific claims challenge, it is likewise for comprehensive claims. The better we do this, the more completely we do this, following a timeline that is not only appropriate to us but appropriate to the aboriginal people, the better we will be as a country.