Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  A lot of the role they are being funded for now overlaps with what we're supposed to do. A big part of our role at the tribal council is to help communities with their capacity, but we're shoved aside. Our funding is cut. Meanwhile, there's a big injection to that. There's a disc

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes, that's correct.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It depends on the community. For us at the tribal council level, it took us 16 months, as I said, to get a new engineer. We try to be competitive with the salary, but in 2013 we got cut by 15% on top of zero indexation. We had worked on a national study for the tribal council pro

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  With language and culture, what we've done.... We've put a lot of energy into preserving our language. It is a challenge for us. You wouldn't think that the dialects would be that different, but between seven or eight communities, the dialects are very different. We have an app c

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Barriere Lake is in the second Algonquin tribal council, but we had a meeting last week through the nation rebuilding program to start working together, all of the 11 Algonquin communities, so hopefully we'll be collaborating a lot more closely in the near future.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  From my tribal council, we don't really deal with teachers. It depends on each community. They look after that themselves. That would be a better question for the First Nations Education Council of Quebec, the FNEC.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  From my expertise, it's more along the lines of professional development, not necessarily with teaching but assisting the communities with more management and administrative-type positions. As far as I know, for teachers, it has been hard for them to stay competitive, and it de

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  For us, it depends. A community that's semi-isolated is less likely to have first nation teachers because they don't go to post-secondary as often, but for a community like mine, which is an hour and a half from Ottawa, I think it's 90% indigenous and community members who are te

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  We provide communities with human resources support. It's important to understand that retaining director generals and other senior managers is difficult mainly because of the stress they face and their responsibilities. I don't think they are adequately supported. When it comes

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  It's still a matter of economies of scale. It makes no sense that each community should have to apply for funding to offer training. When the tribal council provides the training, it's a huge help to communities. The same applies to human resources experts. The communities exper

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Maybe they'll adopt me.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. Good morning, members of the committee. First of all, I would like to acknowledge our local MP, Mr. William Amos. I'm glad to see you on this committee. Will has helped us out a lot with our first nation and other nations, so thank you. To Mr. Vandal,