I think I had the benefit of being in politics at the same time as actually helping the community group, truth be told, with the vast majority of their applications, so I managed to get first-hand experience that a lot of what was being requested was for the purpose of due diligence and to ensure that the funding was actually going to go to a project or to a group that was going to deliver.
The problem is that, with the community organization board, I had to produce probably almost a hundred different types of documents for the CMHC co-investment application. Some of it, I saw, had little or no value—and I understand the respective roles of what a politician or a government is required to produce.
I think we saw in the past how for the Auditor General of Canada, in particular with what had been the former Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, there tended to be an onerous amount of extra paperwork for northern, remote or indigenous communities. I think that stems from a perception that they lack capacity and that we can't trust them.
Yes, sometimes we do have capacity issues, but figuring out what is the necessary and good data to demonstrate that a project can and should be funded, and recognizing that timelines and some flexibility are absolutely required.... As I said earlier, it was almost out of sheer stubbornness that we managed to get the Uquutaq project to the point where the doors opened, with an extremely patient seller of the two buildings, because most of our local contractors would not have waited two years for the CMHC co-investment process.
Similarly, right now we have a very sympathetic seller for Agvvik, but you can't expect that level of patience.
I was just talking to the Nunavut Housing Corporation guy, and he said that we get these high-level political directions that we need these programs to work, and then the bureaucrats are meeting with the bureaucrats and things just stall. We need to see some better direction or some better accountability between the bureaucrats and the politicians, because the money is not going out the door. The people are in need. People are dying, and that's just not acceptable.