Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank my hon. colleague, but I have to say that what I am hearing is a lot of claptrap.
The member stood in this House and said that spending money on indigenous children is what governments should not be doing. Rather, we should give them hope. We should tell them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. We should talk about transparency.
Under her government, every single year $100 million was promised to indigenous schools. Then it was pulled back and spent on tax cuts. The Conservatives promised the money and never gave it. We could not find where the money went. That was the lack of transparency under her government.
The numeracy and literacy rates in the Ontario region of Treaty 9 were down at 21% and 28%. Literacy rates that low cannot be found anywhere else except sub-Saharan Africa.
What did her department do? It decided not to follow up or do any more studies because it could spend the money better elsewhere. We are talking about chronic underfunding of education, whereby children in Kashechewan and Attawapiskat get half of what kids in the public system in Ontario get, and the previous government said that it would not throw any more money at it.
They did not have the money for mental health services. That is why people are killing themselves. It is not because they do not have jobs. We have children killing themselves on reserves where they do have jobs, but they cannot access mental health services. Still, if white kids in suburban Canada need it, they get it.
Let us talk about the role government should be playing here. Let us not talk about giving them hope but not giving them a dime to be able to get an education.