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Our estimates do not include the social benefits and the lower government expenditures
that would arise from increased Aboriginal educational attainment. Moreover, these estimates
assume that Aboriginal Canadians only reach the 2001 level of educational attainment of non-
Aboriginal Canadians. It is likely that over the 2001-2017 period, the educational attainment and
employment rate of non-Aboriginal Canadians will continue to increase. In this context, if
Aboriginal Canadians succeed in closing the gap with non-Aboriginal Canadians by 2017, their
educational attainment would be even higher than what is considered in our scenarios.
Yet, it is important to remember that because improvements are likely to be mostly
driven by younger Aboriginal Canadians rather than by both younger and older Aboriginal
Canadians, the aggregate increase in the educational attainment of Aboriginal Canadians will
likely not be large enough to close the 2001 gap by 2017. Moreover, any increase in educational
attainment coming from already employed Aboriginal Canadians will likely reduce cumulated
benefits over the period as these individuals may forego labour market income during the period
in which they are upgrading their educational qualifications. Finally, it is important to note that
the potential benefits of educating older Aboriginal Canadians might be overestimated since
labour market outcomes are not only a function of education, but also of experience. On the other
hand, only 31.4 per cent of the Aboriginal working age population was aged 45 and over in 2006,
compared to 47.6 per cent for the total population, a fact that suggests that most of the catch-up
could in fact be done by younger Aboriginal Canadians.
B. Base Scenarios - Scenarios 1 and 2
The increase of the Aboriginal population itself has an effect on the aggregate income of
that population. Before estimating the impact of higher educational attainment for Aboriginal
income, the report thus develops scenarios in which Aboriginal Canadians do not increase their
educational attainment from 2001 to 2017. The two Base Scenarios are added especially for
comparisons with the scenarios in which educational attainment is increased. The main results
are summarized in Table 23.
The no change scenario (Base Scenario 1) is considered in Appendix Table 30. In this
case, average employment income is assume to increase by 25.5 per cent over the period, which
is the projected average real wage increase of the overall workforce (Dungan and Murphy,
2007), while employment rates remain constant for each educational attainment category.31 The
gap in employment income between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians for each
educational category is thus unchanged.
This scenario projects a level of estimated GDP created by the Aboriginal population in
2017 of $27,446 millions ($2001) - a $12,013 millions increase over 2001 - with an average
annual growth of 3.66 per cent over the 2001-2017 period (Appendix Table 28). The total
Canadian GDP in 2017 under this base scenario is assumed to be at a level of $1,692 billion
($2001) (Dungan and Murphy, 2007) while employment is projected to be 18,482,547 persons.
Canadian labour productivity, then, is found to be $91,556 per worker. The annual average
31 Of course, the employment rate of Aboriginal Canadians can be expected to increase due to a composition effect
related to the age structure. This is not, however, taken into account in the different scenarios developed in this
report.