Caroline Cochrane

Mr. Speaker, I wish to table the following two documents entitled "Towards Level Ground: Addressing Persistent Core Need in the Northwest Territories" and the "NWT Housing Corporation Annual Report 2016-2017." Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

As stated earlier, the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs has actually been working quite diligently with the federal government to leverage the infrastructure monies that are coming. Communities such as the City of Yellowknife are actually getting a substantial amount of the federal infrastructure monies, whereas other communities who have a surplus are not getting that amount, so I am not a hundred per cent convinced that any tax increases to the residents of Yellowknife are only because of the $1-million shortfall.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We are in the process of developing a long-term plan to address the funding gap for municipalities. That is a commitment. Currently what we are doing is every year, there has been an increase in some of the areas from the territorial governments, and we are leveraging with the federal government's monies to access more infrastructure money.

Communities that are at a surplus currently have been kind of topped, or are staying at that level, and then we are focusing on the communities that have a deficit with the new monies that we are bringing in. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

The Northwest Territories Housing Corporation, it was kind of interesting when I started this position. My understanding as the Minister responsible for the Northwest Territories Housing Corporation was that I was to put houses on the ground. It was a short time later that I realized that actually a large percentage of the Housing Corporation's money does go to providing employment in communities. Not only do we provide jobs for maintaining and building units. We have 23 local housing organizations in communities that we provide support for, too, so a huge amount of our money is actually going...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So, the delivery of modular units throughout the whole Northwest Territories, that has kind of kicked me off. I am going to try to answer this. My belief is that we had 19 constructed, to be constructed with Concept Energy, and one to be constructed with the Energy Wall here, in Yellowknife. So, we have eight that are partially built with Concept, and we have one completed with Energy Wall. We have four that are delivered to communities at this point, we will still need some work on, so at this point we are still short some, but I cannot do the math at this point.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I do want to make a clarification. In my answer before, I had said that we were half-Indigenous and half-Caucasian. That is incorrect. I have been corrected from the other side of the House, and they are absolutely right. We are about half Indigenous and half non-Indigenous. I do clarify that there are other people within our territory as well.

In regards to directing the staff to look into the history of the social housing, I will make my answer short and say yes. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Again, that was two questions. I will do my best at answering. I can say that no, I have not examined a treaty, but I can say that the federal government last year gave the territorial government $28,673,000. That is $28 million. That works out to less than a million dollars per community. It actually works out to $868,878 per community; that is less than a million.

The territorial government put in last year $81,702,000, which works out to almost $2,500,000 per community. Statistics show that our population in the Northwest Territories is half Indigenous, half Caucasian...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Again, I understand the intent of this and I agree with the intent. Again, I am going to abstain on this one because I do have some issues with the sentence: "The outcome of investigations may be published on Election NWT's website or by other means the Chief Electoral Officer considers appropriate."

In my understanding as people are innocent until proven guilty, this doesn't state that, if the findings are proven true that they would be, this says that the Chief Electoral Officer has the ability to define, on her own, outside a court of law whether it is appropriate or...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Currently, the relationship between the Northwest Territories Housing Corporation and the local housing organizations is as a third party entity in that we contract out our services to provide supports on the ground for the housing units that are built in their communities. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the effort that the committee has put into making this motion. I do have a little bit of difficulty with it. My only difficulty is that I recognize that the filing of reports and access to banks is an issue that I will not take -- it is a huge issue. My only concern is that it has really left it kind of vague because it just says "replace it with a practical, reliable requirement that ensures accountability and transparency." I personally would have preferred if there was something more concrete within this than just leaving it to whatever the interpretation...