Caroline Cochrane

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I will address both of them actually. We will change the name from affordable housing for the RCMP. That is an easy fix. We won't do it in this, but we will do it moving forward. The second question was the units that are the four-plexes. They aren't in this business plan because actually they are in this current year's business plan. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

So the auditor does work with the management team within the departments when they are looking at recommendations when they are addressing what is going to be in the actual audit. That is done by the management team, but like I said again, that information is not share with the Minister until it is publicly released. That was only publicly released to me within the last couple of days.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Yes, the department does take into consideration seasonal access. Colville Lake is one community that I haven't been to yet and I want to go to. The units, though, in Colville Lake actually have a high condition rating.

So over the last ten years the Northwest Territories Housing Corporation has invested $2.6 million into capital in Colville Lake and $826,000 into home ownership and minor programs. In the last five years we built two public housing units in that community, and this current year we're building two affordable housing units in that community. Thank you, Mr...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Affordable housing is defined as market housing and the HELP program, which is a home ownership program. Just to add on, the "PH" is public housing. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Speaker, housing costs are a major component of the cost of living, which we all know is very high here in the Northwest Territories. Bringing these costs down is a priority. The Northwest Territories Housing Corporation will be putting out a housing engagement survey that will help us find out how we can design and deliver programs that better meet people’s housing needs.

The Northwest Territories Housing Corporation’s current strategic plan, Building for the Future, was created based on feedback received from residents. That feedback let us make changes to several of the Housing...

Those units are only for single people within the Northwest Territories. In the same manner that we have units that are designated only for seniors we will have units that are designated only for singles.

Our first step actually is to do a thorough analysis of the audit and look at the recommendations that are in that. The other thing that we are doing actually, and just implementing currently, again is we are asking all of our staff within the Municipal and Community Affairs for suggestions on ways to improve, and that includes the recommendations within the audit. So until that work is done then I can't commit to doing a zero-based review.

There's a number of factors that actually stand in the way of -- it's not that we don't fulfil our mandate it's maybe we're not progressing and maybe not doing as much paperwork as we need to, so there are some issues. Municipal and Community Affairs is based on -- years ago we changed it into what's called a "New Deal" and that is really about community development. It's about empowering the communities to acknowledge what their strengths are and their needs are; which is something I really support. So we do try to provide training and support to them.

One of the other challenges that we have...

I should clarify. When I say mistakes were made, it's not that we made a mistake in asking if we needed them at the time. It's just that it does take a couple of years for us to do the business plan and then get the units constructed, so we did err in that way. But it wasn't a mistake to put the units in.

Can we consult on the small communities? Absolutely. We are just in the process, like I had done in my Minister's statement earlier, that we're in the process of rolling out our engagement survey, which will ask each community what type of housing that they need in their community. Thank you...

I can't confirm the actual market rental in Fort Providence itself because each community is different, but I can confirm that as part of this survey, and actually even before the survey, we are conducting a total review of all of our rental for accommodations in every single community, so we're in the process of doing that now.