Immediately? I guess your lens is very important. As an urban indigenous advocate, I think we've been researched and programmed to death. We've been “clientized”, you could even say, and I think that we have to move beyond that.
It took us how many decades to get here? How many decades is it going to take us to get out of here, together, in a good way?
I'm very apprehensive about saying that “this is the key thing” or “that's the key thing” or “this program is key” because a program to me is just how they keep all the service providers fighting for the same bits and pieces. Meanwhile, we lose a strategy. We have to change from being program-immediate based to being strategy-evidence based. That's what we need to indigenize that process, and it has to be open and inclusive for non-indigenous people in that area.
You're Ojibwa. In my community, regardless of our ethnicity, we all come together through our philosophy. The same lens needs to apply in the urban context. Meaningful partnerships between the feds, the provinces, and the cities need to happen, and they need to happen soon. The problem with the feds and the provinces, and even the cities, is that they are imposing stuff on us. It needs to come from the ground up. If you talk to the people in those communities in a comprehensive approach, you can identify where those opportunities are.
There's a lot of goodwill out there, but there's no ability to tap into that goodwill and turn it into a strategy.