Caroline Cochrane

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I can confirm that, at this point, we are in the process of negotiating seven parcels of land for these units. Once the negotiations are complete, I will update the Member. At any time the Member wants to know the status, he is more than welcome to send an e-mail as well. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Yes, I'll talk to them. I will not commit to doing five in the communities. I try to honour my word and I try to be reasonable and be able to achieve what I commit to, and so I will commit to doing one pilot project of a four-plex and after that do an assessment.

Yes, I think that we don't do a good job in actually promoting the benefits of sports and recreation. I think we do but we could do better, and so we will work on developing that as well. Again, it is something that we should be bringing to the five organizations because I also think that they have a role in the promotion of sports and recreation throughout the Northwest Territories. So again, like I said, I will commit to bringing that issue to the table when we meet with them all and see if it becomes solely a department issue or if it's something that all of the organizations should take...

Mr. Martin will address that.

The NWT Housing Corporation is responsible for making sure that any unit that we have, usable or not, is actually maintained. So we provide the cost of the utilities when they aren't occupied.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Yes, I would like to be able to say, yes, we do consider it. There have been a few mistakes on the department's side. We were asked many years ago to actually bring in market housing to the communities to support professionals, nurses, doctors, social workers, school teachers. The reality is once we did the assessment, and then it took a couple years to actually build the units there, some of the gaps were filled. So we're actually currently looking at the communities that have market rentals we're actually looking at our own rentals and seeing if we can reallocate...

Yes. At this point, yes, we will be. We actually have already called a meeting of the five sports organizations, so we're going to sit down, we're going to talk about the overlap that there may be and gaps within services and to try to help them with their long-term planning and also the planning that we need to do within the MACA, Municipal and Community Affairs, itself. So, yes, I can commit to that. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Actually, at this point we won't consider to go back and look at lowering the average of the years, and that is based on knowledge that we have. The Sport and Recreation Council used to control the funding, and their contributions for 2014 to 2017, so that was the three years, were based on ticket sale projections that were not achieved. This resulted in reduced contributions for 2015-2016 and 2016-2017. So using the five-year base for the funding is actually more appropriate; people can more count on what they're getting. So we have promised to every organization that...

The units that I've talked about, the pilot project, are actually managed by communities themselves. They are not managed by the housing corporation. As stated before, this is a pilot project, and so we're going to do an analysis to see how they work. After a year and at that point we'll determine whether we continue with that model or if we have to change our model to more accommodate the needs.

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...