Mr. Chairman, in the smaller Aboriginal communities, I see that everything is tied together and the first problem exists with the lack of employment in small communities. With the lack of employment in small communities, then people are home taking care of their own children, so they don’t necessarily need daycare. However, if we continue, then it will always exist. We will always have low employment numbers in the small communities and people will always be home taking care of their children and not making any other productive choices to change that from being employed so that the employment exists in the small communities as well to get some sort of balance here.
As many of the programs exist, I know that not only this department but every department I don’t believe uses any form of community criteria to determine where dollars should go. I am saying that it is essential that early childhood development dollars that are supportive in nature go into the small communities where they can’t afford anything else, that they can’t afford to pay for their own daycare in communities. Where you have two full-time employed people, they can afford daycare, they can afford to pay private daycare to support themselves and put their kids in a private daycare. In small communities that option is not there. If the people want to educate themselves to make themselves more employable, they can’t afford daycare. So again, I want to know if this government specifically looks at those types of things when allocating, let’s just use daycare dollars for now, in allocating daycare dollars? But I’m talking about everything -- kindergarten, support for preschool and so on -- but for now we’ll talk about daycare. Does the government have some sort of system in place that determines where that money goes?