Thank you, Mr. McLeod.
Jocelyn and I have previously stated in front of other parliamentary committees our frustration that the jurisdictional issues around health information and the current structure of case identification do not include urban indigenous people. There's a reason that the cases in La Loche, for example, outnumber the total declared indigenous cases. If you are not on reserve, you typically don't get the same disaggregated data, which you would need to create good policy.
I would also argue that even when we have good data, public policy has not matched what that data tells us. For example, the majority of indigenous people live off reserve, off Inuit-governed territory, off Métis homelands, but the financial contributions have never matched that number.
We've already reached out to try to gather as much data as we can with our partners—I'm sure Jocelyn can follow up with some specifics—but we also want to make sure that this data is communicated in a way that's appropriate and comes from indigenous ways of knowing. Indigenous people don't typically talk about mental health. When we hear that word, it's not something we're comfortable talking about, but if you ask people, “How are you? How are you managing during this time?”, they're much more willing to tell you that they're not doing that well.
Jocelyn has some more specifics on the health data and the work we're trying to do in that area, but I'll just be very clear: We don't know how many urban indigenous people have died from COVID-19, period.