Well, I think housing and infrastructure go together. You need land. You need to have serviced land in terms of lots, so you're going to need water, waste water, electricity, Internet and the kinds of things that make land into serviceable lots. Then you have to put housing units on top of it, whether they're single-family or multiple home. It's land, infrastructure and housing.
If you're going to do this on an all-cash, upfront basis—which is what the Indigenous Services department has to do with whatever it gets from the Minister of Finance—you can do only so much. You need an algorithm or funding formula for spreading limited resources across a lot of demands. Housing infrastructure is only one.
When I was there, there was a cap—the famous 2% cap price and volume escalator that covered everything. Child and family services, income assistance, education, post-secondary education, housing and infrastructure were all capped by a 2% program escalator brought in by Paul Martin and kept for 15 years by finance ministers. It was lifted by the current government, and spending has nearly tripled on these services.
However, if the results are not getting better fast enough, you have to think that something else is missing. I would say—and you're not going to like this any better—that you're not going to get where you want to be with the department model, because a department pushing contribution agreements out to first nations is not the tool kit that is going to generate housing and infrastructure.