Mr. Speaker, I appreciate that my colleague talked a lot about education because education is very important. However, I am a little troubled by the figures that he has given us in terms of the government investment.
I come from the Northwest Territories where we handle capital investment in schools for about 33 communities, many of them small isolated communities. The cost of construction and maintenance of these schools far exceeds those in downtown Mississauga or in Brampton, Ontario. We are not talking the same thing. An investment of $275 million over this many years, when we have 600 reserves where the situation with the building was dire when the government came in, is simply not adequate.
We built a school in Inuvik. Now that is a little larger a community, but the cost of that school was $120 million to build it properly so it would last for a significant length of time. Therefore, when the government talks about $275 million over a number of years and that it will do renovations and build some new schools, that is not a lot of schools for 600 reserves.
If my hon. colleague were really interested in getting our support for these types of efforts, he would have to increase that by an exponential factor, that investment over five years in first nation reserves' schools.