Thank you, MP Battiste. Your advocacy is really exemplary. I can imagine the amount of pride you must feel to see your community getting priority access. I think it says something about our country that your elders and elders in communities across Canada who are the most vulnerable are getting vaccinated before the Prime Minister or me or anyone who has the privilege to sit in cabinet. That says something about our country. People may say that's a thin veneer. I don't think it is. I think it says something about how we need to conduct ourselves going forward. It's a good lesson to us all.
We know the impact of systemic racism, particularly in institutions where people are at their most vulnerable, whether that's in the health care system or in their interactions with the police. It kills and it has killed, and it will continue to do so until we fix it.
The solutions aren't easy. They don't happen overnight. If they did, I think that would sort of diminish the scope and depth of the problem. There are things we are doing immediately in Indigenous Services Canada, such as making sure that Joyce Echaquan's community is front and centre of the continuing conversation over Joyce's principle, which achieves, broadly speaking, substantive equality between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. It's a principle we support, but we're going to need the provinces and territories to be part of this conversation. We all know about the jurisdictional spats we've had with respect to health care, and in this case those have been on the backs of indigenous peoples.
There is work that needs to be done within my department in terms of how we transform health, how we provide more mental health supports—which is a key issue coming out of the pandemic—and how we move towards distinctions-based health legislation, which will be a difficult conversation with indigenous communities who haven't felt consulted up until now. We will have to recognize that their way of conceiving their own health needs to be respected and can't be dictated to them from Ottawa.
We recognize that a number of the elements and reports that have been published to date don't need much further examination. We need to start investing in infrastructure and supporting local infrastructure and local self-governance over health infrastructure. That is key.
You perhaps have stories in your community about how that is missing compared to the situation in a similarly situated community. That's work that the federal government can do, but as you've heard through the elements of my answer, it isn't easy. It's complex, and in the case of the legislation, it will take time, because we won't succeed if we don't engage with indigenous communities. [Technical difficulty—Editor] distinctions-based health care legislation that reflects the continuing gap and the treatment of indigenous peoples as second-class citizens by the health care system in this country, regardless of the jurisdiction.
I hope I have been able to paint a bit of a picture in the couple of minutes I had.
