I do think there's a lot to be mined there and I don't think we've fully explored the ways in which federal and provincial relations could work around conditionality.
I have seen something emerge from the United States, to which people may say, “Whoa, no way; this wouldn't work in Canada”, but I'll put it out there. I think it's always good to hash through ideas and try to figure out the best way forward.
In the United States, states get money for housing, and the federal government has a point system regarding how much money each state will get for how much housing. It's housing for a variety of income brackets. A state gets more points if it has eliminated the criminalization of homelessness. It actually gets more points and therefore more dollars if it takes this bold step of saying it's not going to criminalize homeless people anymore and throw them into jail.
I'm not saying that's an issue here in how we would deal with it, but there might be an interesting way of saying, okay, for provinces and territories that actually decide to raise their minimum wage to a living wage and their social assistance rates to realistic levels, there might be some incentive to do so, a monetary incentive. We might find that unpalatable—I don't know—but I think it's worth exploring those sorts of issues.
You see, we have a problem with federalism, at least from my perspective, the human rights perspective, in that provinces, territories, and municipalities have human rights obligations too, but they can't meet those obligations if they don't have adequate resources. There should be some sort of symbiotic relationship between the feds and the provinces, territories, and municipalities whereby they're all saying that in order to meet their human rights obligations, they need x amount of resources; they need the capacity. There has to be a shared conversation around that, and I think the leadership has to come from the federal government.