Yes, I can, actually.
In Medicine Hat we are the community entity. We receive both designated and aboriginal community funding, so we have two streams of funding. It was a privilege to be part of the conversation at the federal level. We went to Ottawa and talked about what that would look like for the rest of Canada and what impact it would have.
I'll start with the challenges we had with it when there wasn't a Housing First approach. It left the funding too wide open. We could fund things in the community that were nice to have, not essential to have. Part of that was because the federal funding for homelessness goes back to 2001, with the SCPI. It was a feel-good kind of funding. It looked at managing homelessness, not actually ending homelessness.
In Alberta, when we shifted to a Housing First strategy and had our 10-year plans for homelessness and our local plans for homelessness, they identified Housing First as a strategy.
When the federal government came on board and aligned with the Housing First strategy, it allowed us to rethink how we invested those funds. It was so beneficial at a community level to say that the federal government is requiring this. Prior to that, the community knew there was such latitude with the funding that we could literally keep it for soup and sandwiches if we chose to.
In Medicine Hat we chose not to do that, obviously, and we invested a little bit differently early on, but shifting to that Housing First strategy and having that national voice to it bolstered our position in the community, actually.
With the messaging from the federal government and our seeing how important it is, it was almost as though the federal government had our back so that we could do the work.