I'm going to take a bit of a different frame. What I am really concerned about, more than the timing and everything else, is that the Government of Canada continues to frame urban indigenous communities as somehow different or separate from our relatives who continue to live in their respective historical or current territories.
Since the 1950s, friendship centres have been the direct result of indigenous self-determination, designed to be a support foundation for indigenous people in cities, who for many reasons, ended up there. Friendship centres provided a safe haven that was fabricated from indigenous ways of knowing, outside and beyond historical government-determined boundaries. Current data shows that indigenous people will continue to move to urban centres and the numbers will continue to increase in urban centres. Systems, programs, pandemic planning and public policy are still crafted from a perspective that does not appropriately reflect where indigenous people live.
This can be most easily seen during this current health crisis. The majority of the support fund did not require a request for proposal process, whereas urban people were required to create a proposal. In most instances, it required our national association to intervene in the work they were doing on the ground, to ask questions to make sure we were getting the appropriate data to complete an application to get support for our organizations on the ground.
While friendship centres historically have been designed as wraparound civil society organizations, we have been fighting this notion that across the spectrum of program design within federal systems, there is very little space for urban people. This current situation is highlighting and compounding other problematic realities.
When you look at historically ineligible items to support your community, such as food security, in a time when food security is one of the biggest barriers in our communities, and our organizations know it's not typically an eligible expense, it takes a lot of written confirmation before they will be comfortable spending those resources. They have a huge fear of being told that what they're doing is ineligible.
I'll finish with this. It may seem unusual to a lot of people right now that you go to work every day fighting to keep people alive, but this is a normal occurrence in our organizations all the time. COVID-19 and keeping people alive is not strange territory for us. When you have urban people who are borderline invisible and not quite distinct enough, it takes an incredible amount of work, energy and response to make sure they have the best health outcomes every day. So it's very normal for our organizations not to even consider closing and to keep working, because this is their everyday life.
As we move forward, my hope is that policy responses to a health crisis like we're in right now represent the reality for urban people and for indigenous people in this country. Out of $305 million, $15 million is set aside for where the majority of us live.
Thank you.