Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
My friends, unfortunately this is my last round. They're bringing in the big guns—the honourable member from Nunavut has returned—so I'll have to depart after this.
Before I do, to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, I do want to clarify my point on the important difference between what your report says and what the indigenous services ministry or Crown-Indigenous Relations is doing.
I want to be clear that although significant investments have been made, those targets within the ministry itself have not been allocated—we just previously talked about that—to all of the areas from which indigenous people would actually derive benefit. We've talked about emergency management and the $12 million. Even though there's a bunch of money elsewhere, there is $12 million to tackle climate change for indigenous communities. They're critically underfunded.
After reinforcing that point, I do now want to move to the issue you just mentioned, which is the immense lack of human resources. It's no secret that this work is difficult. It's no secret that in the age of reconciliation, as was mentioned by our Conservative colleagues, truth is a big part of that. It's the human resource emergency that is facing Indigenous Services Canada and Crown-Indigenous Relations that is having a disproportionate impact, a direct impact, on the lived experiences of indigenous people. Whether it's housing, whether it was COVID, which was mentioned, or whether it's the existing lack of funding for prevention and for climate change mitigation, there are issues that are critical to the socio-economic outcomes that we're still seeing in indigenous communities.
In your recommendation, in some ways beyond human resource issues, is it fair to say that when it comes to the process of the government requesting finances, they actually make those requests in light of the human resources need? For example, you mentioned that they did the parliamentary budget cycle fine and they went to the ministry. The ministry reported what they needed but it was unable to actually deliver those things.
In your review of those documents, did they cite the actual human resource need in a way that recognized the actual immense emergency in terms of human resource challenges in the ministries?