With respect to an aboriginal and indigenous strategy for the right to housing, in this area as in others, aboriginal people must have both hands on the wheel, as someone said. We think it is essential to learn from the mistakes of the past, where the development of community housing, social housing and housing in general was not well-thought-out, well-designed or understood by the people in the community. We mustn't make these mistakes anymore. The people of the communities themselves must control the process.
Faced with this situation, the federal government obviously has a fiduciary responsibility, which has been confirmed several times by the courts. For us, that means that a significant portion of the population across Canada has needs, but nowhere are those needs as strong as they are in the aboriginal population. Part of the problem is that indigenous people weren't the ones controlling the mechanisms.
There has to be a separate strategy because there is a distinct situation in terms of national rights, and statistics show that. We have a two-tier regime, and it is important that aboriginal communities, including Inuit communities, have the means to catch up and get what the general population had before.