Mr. Speaker, in January and February I had the opportunity to visit 41 first nation communities throughout Saskatchewan and Manitoba, where I not only skied but also walked over 900 kilometres. On that trip I had the opportunity to have discussions with chiefs, council members, elders, youth, and people who were running child and family services systems. I discovered that in fact there are things that are being built in communities, such as water treatment plants and new schools. There are things that are happening, such as more educational opportunities and economic development.
When I was talking with the CFS workers, agencies, and authorities, I discovered that money is flowing and they have seen a funding increase, but obviously we are at the start of a conversation about this. I wish we could snap our fingers and fix all the wrongs of the past, but unfortunately that is just not going to be the case.
The member suggested that we are blowing an opportunity. However, the way budgets are often looked at is that people will criticize us if we spend money on certain people. For example, I do not consider spending, or blowing, $89.9 million over the next three years to preserve, protect, and promote indigenous languages and cultures as giving money away or as something that is not good for the Canadian state.
This is actually part and parcel. We cannot isolate things by themselves. We have to take a holistic view, which is an indigenous view. It is the ideal of the one in a unified sense. When we consider the spending, it must be taken as a unified whole, and what we do here has an impact over there.