Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I would add that we have looked at the patterns back to 1966, and yes, there have been significant numbers of aboriginal people leaving the reserves for cities. But there have been slightly greater numbers going back to reserves.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  That's correct.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes, from the census. We haven't done the full analysis of the 2006 census, but I don't expect the patterns will be any different from what we've seen in the past.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  You have to have analysis from the past. But let me add another thing here--

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It is logical, and we have done that in the past. One of the reasons you see larger growth in cities is that it's more logical. If you have 100 people and they all intermarry--they do a family formation--you produce 50 couples. That's if they all intermarry. If they outmarry, i

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I think they are in the middle developed range; they're not third world conditions. When I first published the work in 1998, the countries I compared them with were countries such as the United Arab Emirates or Brazil, not that anyone here necessarily knows what the living condit

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  What they've seen is that we have a tool that allows for comparisons of different regions or sub-regions or subgroups within the countries. This is something that the United Nations have been doing ever since they developed that indicator back in 1990. If you're interested, we ca

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I'd add one more thing. We do have another independent source of data with respect to the population counts. Our department has an Indian registry, which is what we use for our actual forecasts of the population for our models, and that falls under section 6 of the Indian Act. It

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It depends on where you set your bar. If you set your bar low in terms of basic literacy, as I said, we're closing the gap. If you set your bar high in terms of university attainment, the gap has actually been widening and continues to widen, such that you'll never close the gap.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It's my own work, which replicated the work of the United Nations Development Programme in the Human Development Index. I first published this in 1998. Actually, the front page of the The Globe and Mail on Thanksgiving Day that year said Indians live in squalor. That work is in

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  We've published lots of research on migration and mobility patterns. For the last 40 years there's been net movement from urban areas back to reserves. The reserves themselves are quite stable. The first nation population on reserve has the lowest mobility rate of any group in Ca

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I don't know if we can fully respond to your question, because we're probably not the most appropriate persons from our department to do so. On the research side, we're the ones who try to speak truth to power. We're the group that does the population projections, which we then p

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  I'd like to thank the standing committee for the opportunity to appear. I'm Dan Beavon, and I'm the director of strategic research and analysis at Indian Affairs. I have a group of about 24 researchers, who are probably the heaviest users of aboriginal data, including census dat