I definitely agree that something needs to be done formally with the urban indigenous population. In some regions we're representing 70% or 80% of the overall population within those provinces.
I think the federal government wrongly tends to rely on working with the on-reserve population, because the reserve is an infrastructure that's there, and they think it's the easiest to do. Yet so many people are moving off reserve out of necessity.
One thing I talk about at our agency is the psychology of poverty. It's not so much that our people are poor; there's a psychology that goes with it that comes from multi-generations of poverty. We have to find ways to break that and reverse it.
Often, service delivery works within certain rules and doesn't take into consideration that indigenous persons who present themselves and who come from an impoverished background, just as Senator Sinclair pointed out, often don't have the resources to respond to a certain situation. Therefore, the system kicks in and takes a child or incarcerates somebody, or whatever, just because there's not a support system there. We're working our hardest to try to reverse that psychology of poverty and put in place systems, but we need something formally at an urban level.
The federal government has just instituted the urban programming for indigenous people. I think there are a lot of flaws in that program, quite honestly.