David Krutko

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yes, we have ordered 33 packages for housing to get to the communities over the winter road. It’s 33.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, as we all know, we do have an aging public housing stock. We do have to replace it. As you know, the funding that we have will be transferring to Education. There is a declining amount over the next number of years which will climb to zero. We have really lost our O and M to operate a lot of our public housing units. The only way we feel that we can be able to continue that is to build more energy-efficient and multi-unit construction and phase out units that are not as energy-efficient and very expensive to operate.

Also, there is a question about...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, it is a business deal and individuals will have to go to the bank for a large portion of this money and he will have to have a business case to do it. As part of that business case, we will have to have the client or, basically, a customer base to provide these 25 units. I believe that we are looking at that in regards to other places, which we have done that through our Supported Lease Program. I think that through this, again, it is not a completed deal yet. There’s still a lot of legwork we have to go through and we have not signed off anything...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, my understanding is that most of these leases are locked in for the term of the lease, but there is an escalation rate that is in there that we do based on the escalation rate that they are able to move on that, but my understanding is that these are locked in leases for the term of the lease. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, that is the goal that we do have by way of increasing the staff we do have in the corporation, especially at the regional level so they'll have more accessibility to communities. One of the things that we do do is that when we have a big project, we will identify somebody specifically for that one project. But if it's just a couple of houses here and there, I think it's uneconomical to have someone in that community just to deal with two or three houses. So that's why a lot of the project officers are based out of the regional office.

Again, we have...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, this will be an application-based program where we will screen the application, identify which clients we feel meet the program. One of the things we are seeing is we are hearing a lot of complaints from people who are in social housing who are paying the high end of the rate scale. Because of that, they don’t seem to be getting any further ahead with the amount of money they are paying on rent. Because of that, we are trying to free up some social housing and get those people who are paying at the high end of the rent scale into homeownership. Yes, we...

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, at our present allocation for housing, we deliver roughly about 118 houses using our budget exclusively. The additional units use the federal funding, is key. But again, I do have faith in the federal system that we have had the legislation passed. We have had dollars identified which is $1.6 billion. Out of that, CMHC has devised a way to allocate, and through the provincial-territorial housing Ministers, I believe we have had support from our colleagues in the provincial and also federal levels. I think, because I feel comfortable that we will get...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, I believe the Hay River seniors’, we have land that we are allocating to the project. I think roughly the estimate on the land plus I think a bit of cash is $450,000 towards that project. Again, it is subject to different approvals and whatnot. But with the land and the allocations, it is roughly valued at about $450,000.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I will see about getting back to the Member with that information at the end of February, probably March, but I will make an attempt to look at these and see exactly which ones are up for review in five years or whatever, and also exactly what the costs associated with the terms of these are, and also the length of time that those leases are out there for.

It roughly works out to one-third of the number of units we are looking at allocating.