I would say that the biggest gap is, again, we, too, fall victim, even in our accountability structure, field by field. Medical transportation is so much money. What's the outcome? Water is so much money. What's the outcome? What's the outcome for children's services?
At the end of the day, most chiefs or leaders will say they're responsible and interested in the overall health, well-being and success of all the members of their community, and all these are but components. Let's have a social determinants' approach to health, if you will.
One of the things is how we measure—and I think we need to do more of it. We have lots of indicators. In fact, in some contribution agreements, there are as many as 4,000 data fields that potentially could be sought or required. One thing for sure is we have to look at what we're asking for via all our contribution agreements and reports, and whether it makes sense. It might be more useful to have fewer reports and 10 good indicators, so that we can validate what we're doing as opposed to this murky spot check that we're doing well on this tiny, isolated thing or so many indicators that we can't correlate to anything.
One of the things that the chief financial officer and I are implementing this next year is a process, and we're going to engage partners on how we can seriously look at streamlining the reporting that we're seeking from communities.
Then the other thing I would say is that where we have good examples, where we can compare what's happening and the public dollars that are going on reserve to other like communities, we should really look at continuing that data. We have something called the community well-being index that uses 2021 census data. It measures community well-being on four axes—education, income, labour activity and housing. They're pretty core—you would think that those are our four keys areas. It allows us to compare those measures on reserve to non-indigenous communities. The gap obviously between the two is large, but since 2021, we are already seeing that gap narrowing a little bit. We know something is working.
I also think that having the reporting at a level of, overall, “what this money is buying in this community” is pretty impressive. I hope in the next census that we continue so that we have a longitudinal pattern of the albeit step-wise successes, but the progress we are making on affecting outcomes for the people we serve.