Thank you, Mr. Chairman. One of the concerns I have, especially amongst the aboriginal communities when it comes to sports and recreation is there has to be more done. We now have two sporting organizations; one with all the money and the other with all the people. Is anything going to be done by the government to ensure that the Aboriginal Sporting Circle and Sport North, which has much of the funding from lottery licenses, is going to be fairly distributed? Will there be a mechanism in place to ensure that the Aboriginal Sporting Circle plays a more active role in recreation development for aboriginal communities? That we do see an increase in recreational activities for the smaller communities? We do not have the ability to have large regional games. We do not have the needed facilities. Many of our children do not have the ability to make it to these large events.
We have to realize that recreation is a means of building self-esteem in our aboriginal communities, especially for the young people. We see that in many of our young athletes, especially in hockey. We have seen a lot of outstanding aboriginal people in the sporting circles from the Firth twins to different hockey players.
We have to do more to build the recreation programs in our small communities where we have high illiteracy rates, where we have a lot of unemployment and we have a lot of problems in our communities. One way we can deal with that is through recreation and building the self-esteem of a lot of our young people in our communities, especially the aboriginal children, and make them realize you can strive for what you want to be, and have an opportunity to partake and participate in those areas.
I would like to ask the Minister, is there anything in this budget that will ensure the Aboriginal Sport Circle plays a more active role in recreation, along with the Sport North Federation?