Ladies and gentlemen, members of Parliament, I want to bring you greetings from my chief, Terrance Paul, of the Membertou First Nation.
As was explained earlier, my name is Darren GooGoo, and I'm the director of education for my community. I've been asked today to come to speak on the issue of post-secondary access and barriers to access.
My earlier understanding was that there were going to be three people at an earlier forum. One was going to speak as an individual; one was coming to speak as a member of a post-secondary institution; and I was going to come to discuss some of the barriers to post-secondary education from a community perspective, and also some of the pitfalls that we as a country need to avoid at some point in our future if we want to maintain a strong connection to post-secondary education for first nations.
With that being said, I think it's important for you to have a small understanding of the community I come from, and where we hope to go and what our aspirations are, because a lot of our aspirations hinge on having a workforce that is able to integrate into Canadian society.
I come from a small first nation know as Membertou. In the early 1900s we were a community located along the shores of the city of Sydney, on the harbour. We were on some prime real estate, and there was a petition by the local member of Parliament to have us removed from that prime location. It was successful. We fought it in the court system for ten years and were eventually removed from our original reserve of Membertou and moved to a community about two and a half kilometres away. It was basically a large swamp, and from that time, in 1926, we've been trying to re-establish ourselves as an economic force within the city of Sydney.
That being said, about ten years ago we made some changes to the way in which we do business in our community; we made some changes to the thinking about first nations governance in our community. When I joined the band nine years ago, we had a budget of approximately $5.1 million and a deficit of approximately $1 million, which anybody who's an economist here knows is just not good business, obviously. We were 25% overexpended, and we have worked long and hard over the last ten years to turn that story around. I'm happy to say that for the last number of years, Membertou has posted surpluses, and we are no longer in a position of continuing to expend more than we take in. So we've had surpluses, and our latest revenue figures show us to be a community with revenues of over $75 million and expenses of about $74.99 million. I don't want to you to get the impression that we have lots of money.
We've taken our good fortune and we've been able to reinvest it in our own strategies in our own community to make a quality of life for our people. Ten years ago the overriding principle in Membertou was that we wanted to create a community in which there was a job for every single person who wanted to work. That's a very, very ambitious idea, especially in a first nation community. Anybody who comes from aboriginal Canada will tell you there are four jobs, and three of them are already taken.
I come from a community where, when I started, there were about 50 jobs at the band office. Currently we have a workforce of about 300 people, and we currently employ, as a community, 630 people. We are one of the largest employers in the local area. The first part of our dream, the first ten years of our dream, was very simple: a job for every person who wants to work—a job for every single person who wants to work.
We've accomplished that in Membertou. But the second part of our dream is a dream that I think we share with the rest of Canada. In the next ten years we want to create enough jobs so there is quality of life; we want quality-of-life jobs at this point. We have enough people who dig ditches, we have enough people who work at cash registers, and we have enough people who do general labour. We have a lot of people who are employed in those service areas. That's what we've chosen. Those are the initial jobs we were able to create.
When we look at post-secondary education, it will be the defining criteria for first nations communities in Canada that are successful and for those that are not successful. Access to post-secondary becomes a very important issue when you look at it from the context of developing a community.
In my community alone—I read an interesting statistic—we have eleven lawyers. We also have fifteen politicians, by the way.
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
Mr. Darren GooGoo: Yet we still don't have engineers, doctors, or dentists. We have some nurses, and we also have an overabundance—I don't like to say this—of teachers. I don't think that's a bad thing because I am a former high school math and science teacher. So we have an overabundance of teachers, and we continue to invest in those people...our lawyers. We continue to invest in those professional people in our community.
When we talk about the barriers to post-secondary education that exist today, we look at our community, and in the last four years we have sent an average of seventy people a year to post-secondary institutions, either universities or community colleges. We've been able to do that.
But when we talk about barriers to access, one of the biggest barriers from a community perspective—and I know you've heard this time and time again—is the issue of funding. Currently, my community receives an allocation of approximately $12,200 to send one person to a post-secondary institution. When I started my job nine years ago, the amount of money we received—and I remember this because it was the first figure I had to deal with at a meeting—was $11,726 per student for post-secondary education.
I remember meeting with the Canada student loans people eleven years ago. At that time, the cost of a university education was about $12,000 to $13,000, so we were close.
In the last nine years, since I've been a director of education in Membertou, the average university tuition cost for the community to pay for someone to go to university has been approximately $3,600. Today the cost to send one person to university is $6,300. So we have this huge $2,700 increase; the cost of living has gone up, and things have risen.
Unfortunately, our funding levels have been stabilized for the last ten years. While we're still expected to send the same number of people to university, now we have to do it with a lot fewer dollars, and we haven't been as successful as we need to be.
We had this large influx of professional people into our community. It's starting to taper off, because it's becoming more and more difficult for students to go to university and be successful. For one of the few times in our history, we have students applying for Canada students loans. I don't think that's a bad thing. I do think that as a community we need to be better attuned to making sure we give our students the tools they need to be successful.
Funding is the first issue. I think the latest report from the Canada student loans people is somewhere in the vicinity of $17,000 for one year of university. We've done a calculation in Membertou, based on how much it would cost, given the rise in tuition. We now spend more money for utilities for people. Textbooks have increased in cost in the last nine years.
When I did an independent study, it cost our community approximately $16,700 to send one person to post-secondary, and unfortunately we receive about $12,200. Anybody who does the math knows that we're about 33% underfunded on a per student basis. That makes it very difficult. It means that at this point we have to begin to pick and choose which students go to university and which students don't. I don't like to be in the position where I have to tell people how to prioritize their dreams.
That's the first issue that I'd like for you to be aware of: the funding issue.
The second issue that I think this committee should be aware of is that, as it stands right now, when we send some first nations person to university in Canada, we are as successful as any person going to university. That to me is an amazing statistic. When we talk about gaps, there is no gap in students' success at university between first nations people and the rest of Canada.
The gap is in our ability to get to university. We are not getting to university in the same numbers, we are not getting to university at the same time, and we are certainly not getting there at the same stages of our life. I think the majority of first nations students in Canada who go to university go as mature students. They're not going out of high school, because we're not finishing high school in the same numbers as the rest of Canada.
That's the second issue that we as a country need to be concerned with. How do we find solutions to get our young people through high school? How do we prepare them to become students at the post-secondary level? That's the second thing I wanted to raise.
The third thing I wanted to raise was the need for a true partnership to exist between first nations and institutions of higher learning. I'm going to give you another example quickly.
I come from a community that has a financial position that allows us to be viewed by the universities as a true partner, because we can bring more to the table than just tuition dollars. We no longer just pay the bills and that's it. We have the ability to go to the universities to say we want to buy programs.
In our community, one of the things we have done successfully—and we're doing it again right now—is sign a memorandum of understanding with a Nova Scotia community college a few years ago. When I first started my job in 1997, we had no students attending community college from our community. Last year we sent over forty. Signing that MOU with the community college and asking them to invest in our people, to invest in a first nations counsellor, to invest in different things, and to come to do some public education in our community around the need for post-secondary education has paid dividends in a very big way for our community.
We are now going through that process with the Cape Breton University and are preparing to sign an MOU with them. It's because they now view us as equal partners in this process. We've gone to them and have said, we'd like you to sign an MOU with us. So we're signing an MOU with the Cape Breton University, and part of that MOU says we want not just access to getting in the door and being successful, but we want Cape Breton University to begin to invest in our people.
Give us an opportunity to bid on contracts within the university environment and make a commitment to hire some first nations people in the institution—not just as professors, although I think that would be great, because I see myself at some point working in a university as a professor, I hope, if I can eventually get there, but also to work in the cafeteria, the secretarial pool, the gymnasium, the sports field, and to do all of those other jobs outside of the professorships in the university. I think they come to the point of saying, we'll hire some faculty. That's good; we want that. But we represent a significant percentage of Canadian society and we need to be reflected within the halls of post-secondary institutions, not just as faculty but as regular staff members.
We've asked them for a commitment on that front, and they've responded in kind and have said they're going to set some targets and work towards this in the future.
That being said, we don't want them to hire people just because they're first nation; we want them to hire people because they're good, qualified candidates. In order for that to happen, our students need to get to post-secondary education. They need to get to those doors and be successful and move through them. That's the third thing I wanted to say.
The fourth thing I wanted to talk about was the moral responsibility of Canada to ensure that first nations communities do not get left behind. I was talking to Jean earlier, and I had an opportunity in the past to listen to Dr. Janice Stein. Some of the things she talked about struck me as being pertinent to aboriginal society in Canada today. When we look over the last year, we see all of the different conflicts that have exploded around this world. If we look at the riots that occurred in France last year, or the London bombings, we see that these acts were carried out by French and British citizens who felt disenfranchised by the greater society.
I love Canada, by the way. I think it's the most wonderful country in the world to live in. We practise a form of government here. By the way, did you know that democracy is a first nations idea? Did anybody know that? Democracy was first practised in North America. But more important, it has been allowed to grow and blossom on this continent. It has happened in such a way that we now have a segment of society that believes in values—the individual freedoms, the roles and responsibilities of our citizens. When I look around the world, I keep thinking I come from a community where there are 630 jobs and only 300 people who are looking for work. We are an anomaly. We are a first nations anomaly.
I know that because I live in a community called Membertou. Thirty miles away is a sister community called Eskasoni. I love Eskasoni with all my heart. I worked ten years of my life teaching in a high school and working in a drug rehab centre. I like to tell people I spent six years in rehab. I spent ten years of my adult life working in that community. But I also know that they have a big challenge ahead of them in the next twenty years. As first nations are the fastest-growing demographic in Canada, we have the ability to solve Canada's labour woes in the future. We have the numbers. We don't need to go and look elsewhere. We need to look inside and invest in that pool of people.
The CEO for Eskasoni happens to be my first cousin, and we were talking one day about all of the challenges that this community is going to face. He says to me, “You know, the biggest challenge we're going to have twenty years from now is that we are going to have 2,000 people looking for work and they will be between the ages of twenty and forty.” I'm sitting there thinking, “Wow, man, that's a big problem.” Right now there are maybe sixty, eighty jobs in Eskasoni. How are they going to generate another 1,920 to 1,940 in the next twenty years? I said to him, “Good luck, man. I can't help you there. But I'll support you. Whatever you want to do, we'll support you as best we can. And we'll provide our experience in Membertou to help your community find some answers.”
Going back to the first question you asked me, one of our current issues is that we need to identify areas in which we want specializations to occur. To that end, one of the components of the MOU we're signing with Cape Breton University is the development of a bachelor of arts in community studies that looks at four specific strands. We've initially identified those four as the areas in which there's a need to develop people.
We're looking at a policing stream, because we need more police officers. We're looking at a social work stream, because we believe we need to get a handle on some of the social issues in our community. We have a teaching stream, because we believe we need more teachers and we need more people to be role models in our community. The fourth stream is a sports option, because we want to develop activities to keep our youth out of harm's way, I guess, and to give them better alternatives when they're growing up.
We also support activities that allow for the development of a professional aboriginal person. We consistently send people to conferences. Our education staff promotes engineers. That's a big thing.
By the way, I have a math degree. I always wanted to be an engineer, but growing up, I didn't see any jobs. I never had an aboriginal engineer role model. I just didn't have those role models.
Why are there so many teachers in first nations Canada? Because these are the only jobs that exist on reserve. We have schools, but we don't have engineering companies and so on--yet. I say “yet” because I'm an optimist. We're going to have them. They're going to come. We're going to train our young people.
If a student wants to become a doctor, or wants to become an engineer, or wants some other type of learning, we will find in our community.... Under the current post-secondary program, you can support that student up to becoming that. Unfortunately, the rates and allowances that are there make it very difficult for someone to study to become a doctor. When all you can provide them with is $625 a month to live in a place like Toronto, Ottawa, or Montreal, it becomes a disincentive at some point for them to stay a student for very long. So we need to find other ways to support them and to allow them to meet those life goals.
That was the first question. The second question was in terms of the graduation rates. We need to provide first nations with the resources, both fiscal and human, to be able to counsel and work with their young people so that they are able to achieve better success at the high school level.
One thing we did in our high school was hire a social worker as our student support worker. In our community we also looked at some of our jobs and said that we wanted professional people employed in our community to allow for better success for our students, and we now have social workers. Some of our student support workers are teachers. We've told them, “You have certain skills and abilities. We're not employing you as a teacher, but you're going to be able to use some of your skills in this job.”
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I appeared before this committee in 1997 to talk about , which later became the Mi'kmaq Education Act.
In our community, we set the priorities in education. We have an education constitution, and it's very simple. It sets out some very basic principles in that constitution. One of those principles is that we will not employ anyone under the age of eighteen between the hours of nine o'clock and 3:30 every single day, because those students should be in school. So even within our own education constitution, we've made education for young people the most basic priority. At the same time, since we now control the envelope of funding for education, we can choose to spend less money in some areas and more money in education, and we have done that.
I'm happy to say that when I joined the band in 1997, the single biggest expenditure in our community was for social.... It's a sad commentary, but also a very real one for first nations in this country. Currently, the largest program dollar expenditure in our community is for education. It's a sign of a healthy, forward-thinking community when they spend more money on education than they do on social issues. So that's one of our commitments. We don't receive more money for education than for social things in our community, but we prioritize our own needs in our own community and make it a priority and spend it.
We currently have an education system that spans K to three. We start our preschool at three years old, and we support students right up until university.
One of the things we don't have funding for, that we'd like to do but are unable to do at this point, is to provide some upgrading access for our students so that when we send them to university as mature students, if there are mature students out there, they have the skills. I don't want to send someone to a post-secondary institution when I'm setting them up for failure. It would be categorically wrong of me to do that. So we need funding to have pre-access programs. We need funding for upgrading so the students can be much better prepared.
At the high school level, as I said earlier, we invest the money that our community receives, and we invest some of our own money. And we have a stronger support network for our students going to elementary and secondary school. So we do that.
One of the things we've done differently is that I have three workers for 247 students on our nominal roll. I have a high school worker, because there are certain unique characteristics of a high school--I was a high school teacher. Every community needs one worker in the high school, because it's just too big a job to spread a person over six different schools. High school students are at the critical juncture in their lives when they need to have the guidance of an elder on a daily basis. We have one student support worker at the elementary level and one at the junior high level, all the way through our system.