Hon. Patty Hajdu, P.C., M.P., Minister of Indigenous Services and Minister responsible for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Northern Ontario: Thank you very much, Senator Plett. I will tell you that closing a gap, especially when that gap has been ignored for decades, if not generations, is extremely expensive. Turning a gap around, sometimes those early investments don’t demonstrate the kinds of success that we want to see immediately. It’s like closing any gap.

It’s not closed, by the way. The government has a goal of closing the infrastructure gap, for example, by 2030. But the gap is so large that even with historic investments in infrastructure, over $18 billion to date, we still see the need of communities far outstrips the investments made to date.

The structural change between the two departments, I believe, was important. It was very difficult to have a department that was responsible for the relationship, if you will — land claims, settling of long-standing treaty disputes — along with a department that simultaneously was responsible for administering services.

We are stabilizing as the two departments have become clearer in their roles, and I think having a department that is solely focused, like mine, on Indigenous service delivery allows for us to get better and better at doing that work through the principles of self-determination.

It’s a huge shift for the government in the way that we think about this work, but it’s an important one. I think it will have a legacy for many generations.

Hon. Patty Hajdu, P.C., M.P., Minister of Indigenous Services and Minister responsible for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Northern Ontario: Thank you. First of all, I’ll reflect back to my opening comment, which is that closing a gap that has been ignored for decades, if not multiple decades, is a huge, astronomical task. In fact, I asked the department when I first arrived a year ago to make sure that they began that work of assessing the gap and what it would take to address it.

I would say, with all respect to the honourable senator, it will take more money. It will take a lot of money to close that gap because, in fact, we have gaps in housing, in community centres, in schooling and in all kinds of infrastructure, including civil infrastructure. Communities are running out of lots to build houses on because, in fact, they are running out of land in some cases, or the land they have is unserviced, so it requires heavy civil engineering. I have learned more about infrastructure in the last year than I ever thought would be possible.

The government is committed to closing that gap. It will require strategic investments of financial resources, and it will require increased capacity, in some cases, in some communities to be able to plan. It will also require rigorous oversight to make sure that the contracted services that we, as a government, fund and that First Nations contract, deliver in a timely and sustainable way. We’ll continue to do that hard work together.