Chair, I do know that, from when I used to be the housing minister, that there are regular -- there used to be -- every few years, they kind of did a cross-departmental check to make sure that -- to see how many market housing needs were met -- were needed. I know that ECE has let us know that, you know, the education bodies let ECE know on a regular basis what they're needing, and I imagine Health has the same. I don't know when that was last done. So I think it might be something that needs to be looked at again. However, I would also caution that might not be the time right now until the Minister can actually have these meetings with the Indigenous governments, until the funding rolls out from the federal government to the Indigenous governments and to the Housing Corp, and we figure out what the Indigenous governments want to do with their money, if they want to get into market housing, which would be something that I would promote them to do to make it sustainable, then it would be kind of futile for us to do that. So I think, though, that -- I'm hoping the Minister would be open to -- yes, good. The Minister would be open to once we have the discussions with the Indigenous governments, find out what their plans are, that she would look at again doing a cross-departmental assessment of the needs in communities.
In saying that, though, I do want to say that when I was the housing minister the issue that I had as well, we asked all the departments what they needed and they gave us a list, and we put houses there. And then when I took over as the housing minister, those -- those same buildings that were identified by departments needed for nurses, teachers, etcetera, sat empty for years to the point that I got upset about it and said give them away to public housing, reuse them. So there's always a fine balance between assessing what the need is and what actually is the need because you might have three teachers -- my son's partner is a teacher and so you would think that you have three teachers and they all need their own unit, but then they get together and they meet each other and they decide to share one unit, and you got two units sitting empty. So there's a fine balance between saying this is the number we need and actually this is the number that we actually do need. So thank you, Mr. Chair.