Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
As usual, I want to thank you all for being here. Again, one of the benefits that we have in this health committee is hearing from experts like you.
I want to thank you and welcome you to the committee, so hello from my dining room table in Mi'kma'ki, where we're fortunate enough in our city to have an incredible friendship centre, the Mi'kmaw Native Friendship Centre over in Halifax. I believe it has expanded a little, bought some land in Dartmouth and plans to expand some of the services it provides.
Jocelyn, you talked about just a handful of the services that friendship centres across Canada provide. I've been somewhat fortunate to see some of this first-hand, and I want to thank you and all of the, I believe, 107 friendship centres and provincial-territorial associations from coast to coast to coast for what you provide.
During COVID-19, what have the friendship centres had to do to reorganize or change operations to continue to provide those services that you, Jocelyn, outlined in your opening remarks, and what does that do to capacity?
Now, I realize that a lot of people are staying home. A lot of the folks who come into friendship centres sometimes don't have homes. Maybe, Jocelyn—or perhaps, Christopher—you could fill me in on some of the ways that you've had to reorganize or change the way you normally do things. I'm also interested in what things look like now in perhaps a city like Halifax where we know there are COVID-19 cases, but we only know them by region, so we don't know if folks who are coming into the friendship centre are actually struggling with COVID-19 symptoms.