Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to our visitors here today for the presentation. We certainly appreciate the discussion on this very important issue.
I represent the Northwest Territories. In my previous life as a cabinet minister of the Government of the Northwest Territories, I was the minister responsible for housing. It was a challenging position. Housing is in crisis mode and has been for some time in the Northwest Territories. When I was elected in 2015 as an MP, it didn't take long before housing came to be the biggest issue at all of our community meetings with municipalities, indigenous governments and the Government of the Northwest Territories.
Indigenous housing funding was non-existent with the previous government, so we had to create a channel to get money flowing. On affordable housing and homelessness, every day we heard about those issues. Even to this day, we still hear about them on a regular basis. Today I heard from the community of Tuktoyaktuk, where they are facing a significant shortage of professional housing for teachers. They may not be able to operate their school properly in the next coming school year.
There's still a huge gap. I'm finding in my job here as an MP that it's very difficult to deal with CMHC and Indigenous Services Canada, because we don't have the proper background. We don't have the statistics to back up some of the arguments that we're bringing forward.
Your report on housing in first nations communities did not examine any communities in the territories or any of the initiatives for people off reserve. As I said before, housing is the biggest issue in the communities of my riding. Could you explain why northern first nations were left outside the scope of this report? I recognize that we only have two reserves, but we have indigenous communities. They're not reserves; they're public communities, but they're indigenous communities. Some of them are 95% to 98% indigenous.
That's my first question.