The whole mandate of the new department that I'm part of at Indigenous Services Canada is specifically to better address the social determinants of health by breaking through those separations across sectors and across mandates, and bringing common purpose services together in one service strategy. Our minister's commitment is absolutely to develop that.
I have spent my entire career in first nations and Inuit health, and I've already seen a tremendous amount of momentum with respect to drawing the linkages between education, social services, health, and really developing a single window service for communities.
Communities have had the flexibility, for the most part, to be able to do comprehensive community planning and to bring those services and investments together, but the federal government perpetuated this program-by-program and sector-by-sector cycle so that for every program you had a job.
It's hard to break through that in a community to and let go of the sense of ownership that people had. It has been an evolution, but I think a lot of communities have broken through those silos and are working together in a multidisciplinary health team, which is frankly what you need to do in order to ensure that you can follow that individual from birth to death, and actually take them through that full continuum of service.