Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I'd like to thank the committee very much for the opportunity to come to speak with you today and share some of our perspectives on aboriginal education. The clerk informed me that you're focusing particularly on post-secondary education, and we'll try to guide our comments towar

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you very much for the question. Local friendship centres across the country receive a total, including the allocation to run the national office, of $16,173,000 a year. That's the core funding. That's to keep the buildings open. If you do it on a full-time equivalent numb

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I think I would dodge that question entirely by saying many of the people we serve in communities don't have an income to apply a tax credit against. That's the nature of the business that we do. We're a food bank to a lot, a shelter to a lot of people, and a front-line service d

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you for the question. I would say, first off, we do provide a go-between, in general, between the aboriginal community and the non-aboriginal community in many respects. With respect to education, a lot come in to attend education programs and get direct services from loca

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  We receive $16 million directly through the aboriginal friendship centre program at the national level. We have some other government programs that we provide on behalf of the department and the federal government. But more importantly, what happens on ground is that funding will

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Well, without being an alarmist, you would have young mothers who wouldn't get formula for their children, and they'd be living in poverty. You would have people who come to food banks not having access to that food. You'd have people in drug and alcohol counselling no longer hav

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It has a tremendous impact on education outcomes. My first job out of university was working in downtown Toronto in a place called Native Child and Family Services. The organization worked with street kids in that community, who were coming into our drop-in, to develop an alterna

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Absolutely, and not only in terms of fundraising.... Look, we're paying our executive directors, if we did the full-time equivalent, $28,000 a year. If we were paying them like your program management within the public service department, your PM levels, the PM-07 making $90,000

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Well, we know there's a definite access issue across the country. There are simply not enough aboriginal head start sites across the country to deal with the growing demands. Those that do have programs have them overrun with children. We've been certainly active in approaching g

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  The alternative schools where I was active most directly were in Ontario's jurisdiction, so they were able to if they met all the criteria. They were mostly on student welfare, quite honestly, while they were in our community agencies, accessing the program, so there were no scho

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I have not had issues with accountability with my first nation providing services for me. However, I think the issue is one of both access and equity--access across the country and equity as to your legal status. If Bill C-31 defines me as an Indian, I have access; if the governm

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  If I were the minister of aboriginal education, I would do both. I would make sure we had appropriate feeder systems in the post-secondary programs where kids and communities could prepare themselves and be qualified for school. That would be number one, to deal with this growing

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  With respect to Kelowna, obviously we were dissatisfied with the process in terms of how we would impact education; we had some thoughts on how maybe we should approach it. I should probably leave this for the groups who were intimate in the development of it to talk about the im

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I certainly can't quote any longitudinal studies that have measured the impact of those students who've attended versus those who haven't. We're attempting to do some research with school boards to look at urban churn--that is, kids living in poverty, leaving one house because da

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  With respect to an urban aboriginal education plan, we've been focused on making sure our programs are able to keep their doors open, quite frankly, sir. We had this invite yesterday at around noon, so we've had a brief amount of time to pull together what we're doing on educatio