I agree largely with what Minister Hajdu said. I think if there's any lesson to be learned from an epidemic of this size, it is that we need to move quickly, we need to be ambitious and we need to be able to adjust on the fly.
I share the committee's frustration about the shifting nature of some of these indicators. Obviously sometimes percentages increase, so we want to be hitting goals at a higher rate, but that does impede our ability to look backwards to see where the issues were and then how to fix them in the future.
Again, this is a model that is evolving, and it is one that we've learned a lot about through the lens of the COVID response and the ability of communities to exercise a very basic right of self-determination. That requires financial capacity, but it also requires support from the federal government in a way that has to be more nimble than it has been in the past.
The inevitable question is whether splitting into these two departments has been valuable. The answer, I think, is resoundingly yes. There are challenges, because as we disaggregate these two departments that have been intertwined for years, we do feel challenges and we do see overlap, and hopefully we don't see misspending. It is important to have these two departments separate and investing in indigenous communities in the way that we as a nation aspire to do, which is on the basis of being equals.
Those are some of the reflections we've been having internally and that we are glad to share with this committee.