Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I'd like to speak to express my support for this motion and also the following motion that's closely related about taking action to address housing as a human right.
So obviously this motion would bring us in line with legislation passed at the national level. In 2019, the federal government passed the National Housing Strategy Act, and that committed organizations and governments such as ours -- or asked us to reform our own housing laws, policies, and programs to align it with a human rights perspective. So I would be pleased for us to do that now. And I think it's fitting that recently this Assembly did decide that housing would be a top priority for this Assembly. And I just wanted to point out too that I think it's important to remember that making housing a priority is more than simply an issue of physically building roofs and sticking people under them. And I wanted to quote from Jesse Thistle who is a notable Indigenous expert in housing and homelessness in Canada. And he says -- he tries to give us some more perspective on what homelessness is from an Indigenous perspective.
Indigenous homelessness is a human condition that describes First Nations, Metis, and Inuit individuals, families, or communities lacking stable, permanent, appropriate housing, or the immediate prospect, means or ability to acquire such housing. Unlike the common colonialist definition of homelessness, Indigenous homelessness is not defined as lacking a structure of habitation rather it is more fully described and understood through a composite lens of Indigenous world views. These include individuals, families, and communities isolated from their relationships to land, water, place, family, kin, each other, animals, cultures, languages, and identities.
So that's a bit of a long quote but the point is that taking action to address housing and homelessness also involves addressing some of the underlying issues that lead to inadequate housing and homelessness and trying to understand what relationships and supports have been broken to take people to this point and how those can be restored.
And I think this motion also fits well with the principle of housing first which is that people need housing first and foremost before we can expect them to move forward in other aspects of their lives, whether that's furthering their education or getting back to work or taking care of their kids or trying to heal from addictions or whatever the issues are. All of those things become impossible if you don't have a home -- or to have a house -- adequate housing.
And if those reasons are not enough to convince people, I think it's important to also point out that there are financial reasons to make housing a human right and to address homelessness. Multiple studies have shown that it is cheaper to house and support people on their path to recovery than it is to just manage their homelessness through emergency responses, police callouts, hospital work, and ultimately jail. According to a study done at McGill University through a housing first approach, we can see reductions in the price of interventions from about $20,000 per person to $6,300 per person per year. So that's a 69 percent reduction in costs. And another study done in Alberta found that those who were housed through a housing first program between 2007 and 2013 experienced significant reductions in their use of the public systems. So that was 85 percent fewer days in jail, 64 percent fewer days spent in hospital, 60 percent fewer interactions with emergency medical services, 57 percent fewer interactions with police, and so on and so on. So simply put, continuing to try to manage homelessness costs a lot more than ending it. So for all these reasons, I will be wholeheartedly supporting this motion put forward by the Member for Deh Cho and Range Lake. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.