This report was issued last year, which marked the middle of my mandate. I felt it was important to take a step back and see if any progress had been made on something that my predecessors had really spent a lot of time talking about.
Sheila Fraser had found, at the end of her 10-year mandate, that the progress made on indigenous matters was unacceptable. Then Mike Ferguson, partway through his mandate, said it was “beyond unacceptable”.
I didn't want to get to the end of 10 years and find another word to add in front of “unacceptable”. I felt it was important to change the dialogue and talk about really having a change and fundamentally taking a different approach, because strong words weren't driving that change.
One of the things I found throughout this follow-up was that there's been a lot of activity, and I know there have been many questions today about progress. There absolutely has been progress, and there's been a lot of activity, but it's about taking it all the way through. Designing policies around medical transportation, so you know how to store and collect data is great, but during our audit we found that the department couldn't show us that they were actually following their own policies.
There is a lot of activity around what dental services should be added to the dental care program, but there are no real changes to the services in the program. It's about taking it all the way to the end. I think that's linked to one of our barriers, which is about making sure you define what service levels are, and then following through on that commitment. We've only held the department to commitments it has made over the years, not to perfection.