Thank you very much.
I want to congratulate my colleague Minister Miller, because in fact it was Minister Miller who led this approach with the COVID response for first nations.
What we learned was that we needed to more rapidly move to a trust model for first nations and that the method of distributing money and resources in emergency times was overly burdensome for first nations experiencing crisis. We've certainly taken the lessons of COVID-19 and applied them to the transformation of the emergency management program so that communities have the flexibility to be able to respond quickly in a very personalized way.
When things are too prescriptive and application-based, two things happen. One, communities really are set up to fail, in some cases, if there's an application they may not have the ability or time to complete, especially in a crisis; two, categories can be so prescriptive that the hands of the community are tied with respect to using creativity or self-determination to respond in a way that could be more effective than a government-determined approach.
We have taken the lessons of COVID-19 to heart. We are transforming a number of programs, and as new programs come on board, we are using those lessons of self-determination and autonomy in the design of how money gets to first nations and indigenous peoples.
I think part of that reconciliation is to have trust, just as we would with provinces and territories. You know, massive amounts of money are transferred to provinces and territories every single year for health, social services and infrastructure, and a lot of that money is transferred with very little requirement for outcome measurements, never mind criteria about how that money needs to be spent.
Now we are in a nation-to-nation relationship, leaning into this new fiscal way of ensuring that communities have that autonomy to respond.