Yellowknife was touted as the best place almost in Canada for that model. When the HPS first started, we were told that everybody, including indigenous governments, had to be at the table or we weren't getting any funding. We all came to the table because we all wanted funding. We all got along. We all developed a really thorough plan. It was a collaboration. On and on it went.
All of a sudden, the federal government decided to change the whole thing and make it city hubs. Now the city controls it. There's a hub. They disbanded the community committee. It became a very bureaucratic, non-inclusive, silencing kind of body where they decide who gets the money.
So it did work, I think famously, and if they had maintained that concept and that model, I think it would have worked across Canada. They changed the structure, and I think it doesn't work that well. We have to really keep in mind that the voice of people with lived experience is excluded by service providers, by government, by decision-makers. They're all talking to their navels. They have no idea how to move from homelessness to contribution to greatness.
I think many people can do that. I did that, and not because I was punished and put down and pathologized. I did that because my sort of behaviour was normalized as somebody suffering from trauma and other things, and once I dealt with that, I could move forward, which I did. I think the system tends to pathologize. Women themselves tend to dig themselves out and move on, if we can just get everybody else to move out of the way.