Mr. Speaker, as the post-secondary education critic, I know my colleague from Victoria comes up against the cost of tuition and the cost of student support all the time. It is compounded in first nations communities because many times we have older students who are returning to school and they need to deal with things like child care and additional transportation costs because they are often leaving remote communities.
In terms of the importance of a culturally relevant curriculum, which includes things like trips to Alert Bay, there simply is not the funding to develop that culturally relevant curriculum and there is not the funding around appropriate language material. In terms of support to first nations post-secondary education institutions, it was not until amendments to the Indian Act in 1951 that first nations people were actually even permitted to go to post-secondary institutions.
We also have this long and sad legacy of residential schools which has meant that many students have struggled in terms of leaving their communities to go away to educational institutions. The importance of first nations post-secondary educational institutions is extremely important in that kind of social context.