The Reaching Home program was started in 1999. It was reprofiled from the homelessness partnering strategy, or HPS, into Reaching Home two years ago with the work we did to update it. It hadn't really been touched since 1999. That's when we added an indigenous stream and a northern stream to deal with the territorial issues.
One of the clear things we heard out of Quebec and from the panellists from Quebec—I might transpose their names, so I won't try to test my memory on this one—was the notion that, first of all, it's driven locally. The federal government doesn't decide how the dollars are spent locally. That's done by local leaders on the ground. In Quebec, because of the model of the National Assembly, we have regions with all of the stakeholders—hospitals, police, legal as well as housing providers, municipalities and the social service sector. They design the program. They take the dollars and they spend it into that program to coordinate both the access of people into a housing system and the services required to make them succeed in housing.
Chronically homeless individuals don't succeed if you just give them a set of keys and put them in a house. They do better, but they don't get better because of the housing. They get better because they're in shelter, but in order to give them independence and a higher quality of life, those social services have to be applied to the housing. Quebec does it better than any other jurisdiction in North America, I would argue. We used the Quebec model and changed Reaching Home to reflect it rather than make Quebec the outlier in this situation. Quebec is doing excellent work here. We shared the best practices of Quebec and rolled them into Reaching Home. In fact, Jean-Yves Duclos played a critical role in that.