Mr. Chair, this is an area that’s, I guess, a difficult one to deal with, because you would expect that, for not only aboriginal people but also for Northerners, they would get educated through the education system and then they would be able to get a job with the government and work their way up through the ranks.
But my experience with the civil service is that if you want to get aboriginal people into senior management or management, you have to take extra steps, because not everybody wants to go into management. If they want to go back to school…. Most of them have families, and so you have to make some arrangements to try to accommodate them. I think that generally you’re looking at trying to accommodate them at 60, 70 per cent of their salary to go to school.
Those are the kinds of arrangements you would have to make, and with the budget situation getting tighter and tighter, it gets more difficult to do that. Then how do you do it so you’re not seen to be playing favourites? Those are the kinds of things that you have to deal with, and you have to have a real commitment to make it happen.