Thank you for that question.
I think the reality is that when you think about my story—and I share that not for consolation, not for pity, not for anything else than awareness—I've been working in this industry for 28 years. We see people from all nations, not only from within Canada but from across the world, who come here looking for safe, secure housing.
They come to urban indigenous community leaders like AHMA and our members and our providers because they have a sense of safety. They don't have to explain the trauma they live through every day. They don't have to explain why they're seeking education or why they're seeking employment. They don't have to explain that their child has been apprehended and is now living 15 minutes away.
I live in Mission, British Columbia. Abbotsford is 15 minutes away, but technically and theoretically are two different things. A woman like me, who has had a child apprehended, as an example, a child who is now living in Abbotsford.... I don't have a vehicle. I don't have transportation. The infrastructure to get me to my child is [Technical difficulty—Editor] The success of me meeting the criteria to re-obtain that parenting of my child is very limited, and this is considered a city—both Mission and Abbotsford.
The people in the urban, rural and northern regions are even more challenged in those capacities, so when we talk about needing that fourth stream, it's because we have lived this. We experience this. We know this. We've been doing this for over 50 years. Here in British Columbia, we have a collective experience of over a thousand years of understanding what culturally safe, trauma-informed work means when it comes to supplying the appropriate housing for our communities.
That is why we were fortunate when B.C. said yes and agreed to let AHMA do their own administration and to let AHMA create their own strategy, yet they can't sustain it. We need the federal government to step back into the game. Evan Siddall came here in 2018 and promised us they would, and we sit here four years later waiting for action. We're waiting for an actual dedicated investment where somebody like AHMA, something like the CHRA's national housing council recommendation.... We submitted, over three years ago, through the national housing council round tables, a recommendation for a “for indigenous, by indigenous” national housing centre that can do exactly what AHMA is doing here in British Columbia. So, as Murray Sinclair once said, we laid a path for you.