It's interesting; Minister Duclos and I had a good conversation prior to him being succeeded by Minister Hussen. Our organization dates back to the 1990s. The grassroots foundation started with devolution of the housing programs across the country from the federal government to the provinces. We were fortunate here that the Province of B.C. agreed that “for indigenous, by indigenous” should exist even back then and had a strong commitment to allow us to be at the table to negotiate how that transfer would happen.
The CMHC of the day said they didn't care what we did with this program as long as poor Indians got housed. The Province of B.C. was fortunate enough to say that they actually wanted us to to decide for ourselves how that looks. That is the current iteration of AHMA.
Evan Siddall is a breath of fresh air. I have to say that we've seen a lot of genuine interest in their processes and in their communication strategies to interact with us and have conversations. When the rapid housing initiative was released, I reached out to Evan and asked him to treat AHMA as a municipality because of our broad representation. If they're going to make allocations to municipalities, we would like to get a lump sum allocation for our programs. He said no, but he said he's not opposed to that idea. We continue to work with him today on what that could look like, going forward.
So I'd say it's good. It's better than it was.