Public Accounts committee  Essentially, it took three years to develop the new methodology to produce the new baseline of that 26% and 44% for that cohort we have. We need to have two years to compare and then a year to gather the data, which is why we had to continue to report, in previous years, up to this year, using the old methodology, even though we were developing the new methodology.

Public Accounts committee  It's done through a structured process. We essentially meet with the mandated team from the first nation, and we start going through various pillars we've defined in our public material. It starts with first nations defining their objectives, gaps, vision and goals, and then what timeline they would take to get to those closed gaps, beyond the comparable funding that's given now, what defined activities would be needed to close those gaps, and what the defined costing would be for those activities, over a period of time, to achieve gap closing and to achieve the defined vision and outcome.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you. In our graduation rate methodology, the fundamental change from the one used in previous departmental reports is this: We now follow a cohort of students who enter grade 10 in a given year and provide two sets of data. One is for students who graduate on time—that is, within three years of entering grade 10.