Mr. Speaker, it is extremely important to have a balance in the economy, working with indigenous communities and making sure we can get it done in the right way, but that takes a lot of effort.
We have seen 50,000 consultations on this side by the government contacting individuals and first nations, talking with people directly—Canadians, indigenous people, environmentalists—ensuring that environmentalists can actually give their opinion when we are building this to make sure it is done in a good way.
This works to ensure that indigenous peoples can also see a profit from this, that they can have sole-sourced revenues, so that they can fund their own programs.
Not only that; it is also about ensuring that we invest in those things that sometimes people do not see, like the aboriginal centre on Higgins and Main in Winnipeg Centre, which has received money to retrofit its windows, so that it can have less heat loss, so that the building costs less to heat during the winter, which is sometimes very long in Winnipeg.
We have also been spending lots of money ensuring that indigenous communities do not have to truck in thousands of tons of diesel fuel to run electrical generators, that we hook communities up to the actual hydro being produced on their territories. That sounds like equity.
Let us talk about Shoal Lake and building the Freedom Road so that indigenous peoples can actually access their community, and then we can actually start building a new water treatment plant, which supplies the city of Winnipeg with its clean water. These things are concrete actions that we have been taking day in, day out, year after year for the last three years, which have started to make a significant difference in people's lives.
I hope we do not stop, because if this stops, if we do not have the opportunity to continue, we are going to set back reconciliation and we are going to set more Canadians back into poverty. That is not what we should be about here in this country. We should continue investing in all Canadians, making sure that all Canadians have an equal opportunity, an opportunity to succeed in this country, our nation.