Toyaxsiim. Thank you for that.
We are going ahead with our own provincial urban indigenous housing strategy, largely because we anticipated that the national housing strategy would eventually include an urban indigenous housing strategy, and we wanted to hit the ground running and be ready for it.
Because I sit on not only a provincial organization but also on national organizations, I have had the privilege of having meetings with the previous minister, Minister Duclos, as well as Minister Hussen, Adam Vaughan and Evan Siddall. We knew that we were going to eventually get to a position where there would likely be some sort of an investment in urban indigenous housing, so here in British Columbia we took it upon ourselves to get the ball rolling so that when or if there is an opportunity for us to feed into that we would be ready to be partners with the federal government.
I think it is important to be abundantly clear that when I speak about the dispossession of urban indigenous people, we never ceded our rights as indigenous peoples because of colonization, and so we never ceded the right and responsibility to sit as equals with the federal government. That's why we're preparing.