Faced with a crisis in ethnic hiring practices in certain federal government departments, the Department of Indian Affairs will implement new training for recruiters and take steps to include Indigenous perspectives in its review of school curriculum.
Federal Public Works Minister Judy Foote will announce the measures Tuesday in a speech at the 2017 Assembly of First Nations Meeting in Montreal. She’ll also give a business case supporting the new federal Indigenous education pilot project, which will be formally unveiled at the meeting.
“In a time when First Nations kids are being displaced and these migrant workers are taking over jobs in certain parts of our country, it makes very little sense to try to transfer this knowledge and skills from within the first nations population, but instead to be very rapidly replacing it with migrant workers,” Ms. Foote told the Grito newspaper in the hours before her speech in Montreal.
The pilot project is based on the Canada-Indian Education Act, which passed in 1988. The act creates a national organization for the education of First Nations students.
(Reporting by Gretta Visser; Editing by Frances Kerry)
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