Thank you for the question.
First, my apologies to the chair. I had the interpretation button on and I was not able to hear you, so please accept my apologies for earlier.
Having stable funding—and that's more than just one or two years—is incredibly important, especially when we are talking from a rural, remote and northern perspective, because government has not, in a meaningful way, invested in housing. Because of that we've lost our capacity to develop, build and create housing. When there are programs that come along, we have to spend a lot of resources on bringing in consultants from across the country to tell us how to do this and how to build it.
From that standpoint, having a more permanent structure as to how resources flow through a strategy like a national housing strategy, especially an indigenous housing strategy, allows our community to start planning for it. We can start aligning our labour force with it, and if we had it for a couple of years, suddenly the creation of housing is also an employment program. It becomes an income program.
We're not just building housing and shipping the resources out to other companies coming in to build in our community. It really is by us, for us. That is where longer-term funding would be a game-changer when it comes to creating housing.