Caroline Cochrane

The assessed rent will be market rent within each community.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Department of Justice actually pays 70 per cent for the policing services. The RCMP will be paying rent for the units. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The federal government, as people know, is getting out of the staff housing for the RCMP. They approached the NWT Housing Corporation. We look at this as two things. One is that to retain employment within our communities, we need to have housing for the RCMP to be in the communities. The other thing is it will be a revenue resource. With the declining CMHC funding, we are looking at the revenue that would come from that to be able to transfer into the operating and maintenance for public housing. Thank you.

As stated earlier, the initiative is not to displace public housing. It is a revenue source to be able to supplement the public housing. I also can give you some information on the federal units that the RCMP had. At this point, the federal government is saying that they’re beyond repair for them to make them financially viable. They will be offering them out to market. If they are not taken up by the market within the communities, then they’ll send them to negotiations with the Housing Corporation.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As previously stated in my answers, the benefit of the Housing Corporation taking on this initiative is that we will retain RCMP officers within the communities and we can use the market rent that we will be charging them to subsidize the operating maintenance costs to the public housing considering that the CMHC funding will be dissolving. Thank you.

I am more than interested in visiting the communities and the regions. I would, however, have to have a date, so I could check my schedule. If available, I would be pleased.

At this point, no, we don’t know what their plans are, but we can inquire and we can get back to the Member on that.

The priority for the RCMP housing would be non-market communities where there are no landlords that provide it. Those would be the first ones that we would be looking at.

Currently, it costs about $18,000 to $20,000 a year to provide the operating and maintenance provision for public housing. For every unit that we rent out, we would be able to support that cost.

If the Member would like to meet with me any time this week, then we would coordinate our schedules and see what times works good for both of us.