The Aboriginal cultural awareness training, I would hope the Minister would not bank 100 percent on the e-training. It’s easy to go there and click things and don’t really have a relationship. It’s all up here. You can say I know how to make fire because I learned it on e-training or how to do this and that. That is not what I hope I envision this government is going to do. I hope they would take half that training, 50 percent, and go out and do the experiential training, out on the land with the real McCoy and do the real thing. I hope that is there also, that they take the senior bureaucracy and go out on the land for two or three days. That’s just a warming up to the culture and that they have that training solved.
I know the Minister is looking at rolling this out. It’s going to be a huge, enormous challenge. It’s the first time I think in the history of this government that we are embarking on a journey of
understanding the Aboriginal people and their culture. How they work it, you might not have all willing, happy campers going. Some of them will question the policies. Some are going to question why we are doing this and some of them will question the validity of this. They might even tell us we’re wasting money. Well then, we have an answer for that: we really don’t want those types of employees working for us, for me.
We need to work it in a way that the Minister has some good support systems in place and good structures in place to say this is important. We want to attract young Aboriginal university and college students or students that are just out of school to our workforce. We need to make sure that they are okay. For me, this is a long process and I think that the Minister is starting out on a good process. I look forward to the next three years to see how this develops into a world-class Aboriginal training for employees, not only the government but for corporate. This is something that they can use. I think it’s a program that I would like to put my rubber stamp on it and say yes, I was part of this government, I did this, in 10 or 15 years. I want to wish the Minister good luck.