I was raised in a small town in southern Ontario. I think a lot about my reality of living for 30 years now in a larger urban community, although when you ask me where my home is, I will tell you that it's that small community, that town in southern Ontario.
I use the word “community” specifically. We have great communities doing great things, but what we've lost is the concept of community. There's been a lot of discussion about what we need in our communities, whether it's affordable housing or supports to people, but we need empathy in our communities. We need supports for people who are experiencing difficulties.
I recently hosted a very challenging community event, where we started to really see the divide between what people think. In our community, that's a challenge. Whether there are concerns about racism or those kinds of things, those are coming out more. The lack of community....
I appreciate that it isn't necessarily a federal responsibility or a provincial responsibility. It lays more on the municipal responsibility. It's for us to take the resources we receive from the federal government—as you've indicated, they grow—and to use those in ways that support the community approach to things, where people wrap around others in our communities and address issues of poverty in ways that we've always done, but that we've forgotten how to do. That's what we need to get back to.