When developing the new program for Uquutaq, what was important was to make the community groups aware of, under the Reaching Home funding, the value and need to develop stronger and better partnerships among the groups, so we were beginning to facilitate that. Part of the problem sometimes is that, especially with the highly transient population, you get new people coming in and they really focus on their own instead of remembering to reach out.
We do have a bit of a challenge, as well, in trying to increase the number of Inuit who participate on the community boards.
I'm a big proponent, also, of our needing to see more Inuit actually staffing these community groups. Tukisigiarvik is one group that does a lot of that, where you don't know who the Inuit board members are versus the staff and Inuit clients. That's the best model, so reminding and getting the groups to work together so that the clients have access to more services is really important.
There's quite a lot available in Iqaluit. As I was saying earlier, unfortunately in the smaller communities there's a lot less. There may be no shelters. There may be a fly in, fly out mental health worker. The vacancy rates for those are very high in the government. It's 50%. There is yet to be an addictions treatment centre, but there are plans to develop that. There is funding for these. The challenge for the groups is to be aware of the funding to set up these societies. Sometimes you can get that far, but then there's a lack of buildings for these societies to work out of.
If we're going to tackle this, I absolutely agree with you that we need to look at what a client or a community needs to help people who are most at risk, homeless or near homeless, to have these support services so that they can address a lot of the challenges they face to be successful. This includes more training and education, and housing tied to Inuit employment plans to therefore have more local people access housing. A lot of our housing is staff housing, and predominantly people in the south coming up get prioritization for that.
There's a lot of things that need to be looked at.