Thank you for that question. I don't think there's any really easy answer to that, but I do think that, when it comes to benefiting from taxation, first nations historically have been at the bottom of the list. If you take a look at housing deficits and who has actually benefited from the land and the resources that have been extracted from it, it hasn't been first nations.
When you look at the vast amounts of money that have been created through tobacco, which is one of our medicines, it really hasn't been first nations until recent decades. If you talk about wealth, it's more than just money. It's more of a holistic view. Well-being is part of that, whether it's social, emotional, mental, spiritual or financial. There's our social innovation, social finance, entrepreneurship—which is coming back now—co-operatives and non-profits, and there are the essentials, which are things that we really have struggled with historically: housing, food, employment, purpose and education. A lot of this has stemmed from things like the Indian Act, which really limited what you could do.
For instance, we're just now playing catch-up with regard to the inclusion of indigenous peoples in the economy. For a long time, we couldn't even hire lawyers, for example. We couldn't vote. We haven't really been included, so we really just want to catch up—we're playing catch-up. We haven't had statutory funding. We've had funding that's been discretionary funding, which is at the goodwill of the government. I think hopefully we can all agree that the government hasn't had a lot of goodwill when it comes to first nations. If you take a look at how many boil-water advisories there have been over the past few decades, at the housing crisis or all these murdered and missing indigenous women and girls, we know that there hasn't been a lot of support for first nations. There hasn't been a lot of benefit from the taxation when it comes to supporting that.
First nations now control less than 1% of the land mass within Canada, so Canada has enjoyed 99% of the land and the resources that have come out of that. We need to look at things not just in terms of taxation but in terms of resource revenue sharing, and also look at taking care of the environment in a sustainable way so that the next seven generations can enjoy it the same way that we do today. Again, enjoyment of the environment is another form of, I think, economic reconciliation. There's tourism and all sorts of things that we can do nowadays.
I think in terms of taxation, we've gotten the short end of that, of receiving the benefits of taxation. There are all sorts of hidden taxes we haven't really talked about either yet [Technical difficulty—Editor] that are in all sorts of goods and services that we get. Hopefully that helps to answer your question.