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“The key thing that was supposed to happen in this program was monitoring, and you failed,” said NDP MP David Christopherson. “Why, why, why do we have consistent failure when it comes to our Indigenous sisters and brothers?”

Liberal MP Chandra Arya raised concerns about the amount of money spent through the programs, which deputy minister Graham Flack pegged at $2.4 billion since 2010 for the Aboriginal skills strategy and $300 million for the skills and partnership fund.

“We don’t know if that has been used effectively, and if any good has come out of that,” he said. “Don’t you think that this is sort of unacceptable and too uncomfortable to hear that number?”

Conservative MP Kevin Sorenson, the committee’s chair, suggested ESDC is hampering progress on reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.

“I can tell you, sometimes you wonder how you gauge a government,” he said. “Well, you gauge a government on results, and sometimes the departments are the ones that carry out the government mandate.”

Last spring, Auditor General Michael Ferguson found that ESDC had no way to know what kind of work Indigenous people who received training were finding afterward.

“So even if somebody got a part-time job or a job for five days working on a construction project, (the organizations) counted that as one of their clients getting a job, even though it was very short-term,” he said at the time.