Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Member's suggestion of a full-time aboriginal language coordinator in the community is a good idea. I should background this somewhat as to what we do now, and the process that we feel obligated to work under so that there is some understanding of the process we are using.
At the moment, the schools have classroom assistants and language specialists whose responsibilities are to address the whole issue of languages within the school. That is a resource that is available for the children in the school. I do not know whether that can be expanded beyond that, because I am not sure of what the regulations are with regard to unions and so forth.
The other part of this is the funding to the aboriginal language communities. We feel that the language communities are the lead in their particular areas with respect to addressing and developing a plan for language revitalization. They are doing that as we speak. In that, there is a possibility for them to identify such things as a language specialist in a community to work in communities, or for several communities, whatever it is.
The restriction we have today is the resource availability. Because we have already allocated our funding to that, we either do it to the schools or we do it to the aboriginal language communities. So we would have to address that in a different way in order to find the resources. There is certainly, as I am well aware in some of the regions, the loss of languages that is there and the need to address the revitalization.
The cultural awareness is another area that I think Mr. Nitah was very concerned about. We do provide some funding through the Cultural Dene Institute. Again, we are somewhat restricted. We tried to be fair across the board on our funding. Thank you.