I think there's a lot that government can do. There are first nation organizations that look at these things. They can provide templates for best practice housing governance regimes that they can provide to first nation communities.
Just as an example, we mentioned Fisher River earlier. The first time I encountered Fisher River as an example.... We at the Frontier Centre had a study for years called the “Aboriginal Governance Index”, which involved us travelling to first nations in all three prairie provinces and asking average people about their quality of governance and services. We've talked to hundreds of people over the years and we would find out about these things. One the things I found out was, for example, that in Fisher River there was a problem with the politicization of housing programs. I talked to a lot of people, housing managers. They were concerned that the decisions being made weren't for the benefit of the situation in front of them. In Fisher River, they felt that how people voted was playing into it.
I don't know if they're still doing this, but what they did at the time is that they had a program where they basically assigned numbers to people on housing. They took out identities, they took out names of people. There was a concern about who you were related to, those kinds of things. They found this was a very effective program. Single parents and up-and-coming families were getting housing and it had nothing to do with politics. So that was something that worked for them.
Communities like that and first nations can provide all these examples, and the federal government can somehow facilitate first nations, knowing about what programs work. Not all of them will be the same. I think that I'd recommend that the federal government provide capacity and funding for first nations to set up the housing governance programs, so that they can set these things up and run them as an experiment.
I mentioned that the Institute on Governance had an interesting system where they had an outside accreditation body that would come in. It's like ISO 9001, that system where they adopt certain financial and management standards. That would actually affect funding and things like that. So for outside bodies that would fund the housing, they would know that the first nation is well run. They would have to provide certain audited statements and things like that and governance systems. I recommend that the federal government look at outside accreditation systems among first nations, because it's not the federal government coming in and telling people what to do: They're usually outside bodies and they can also be indigenous-run bodies.