Robert C. McLeod

We’ve heard from the volunteers who get the awards at award ceremonies that the last thing they want is to draw any attention to themselves. That’s what makes it a pretty special group because they don’t do it for the recognition is what they always say. They just like helping out their communities.

As far as an official list goes, I suppose during the end of the year, a couple of phone calls to each region saying how many people did you have volunteer instead of putting an official list together, just some numbers. I think they will be quite high. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

As far as a territorial-wide volunteers list, not to my knowledge is there anything like that that exists; however, in every community for local events they do know within the community who is always volunteering for different events. As far as a territorial-wide list, I don’t know of one. Thank you.

People have to realize that by making themselves homeless, I mean, they’re still given certain points, but I would encourage people not to make themselves homeless thinking that it gives them an opportunity to get to the top of the list because, as I’ve said before, there are many factors that we take into consideration.

I don’t believe that the Housing Corporation puts up barriers. I think, if anything, the Housing Corporation eliminates some of those barriers by having people more eligible for a lot of the programs that we have. With the Rent Supplement Program, it’s a fantastic program and...

Mr. Speaker, the Member is correct. The people that are in these units, our hope is to see them transition, I think, in most cases, into the public housing. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

The Crown land will convert to Commissioner’s land. The IAB lands will pretty well remain the same because I think that is an agreement with the Government of Canada to reserve land, so I don’t think those are going to change. I’ll confirm that and I’ll communicate that to the Member, but as far as I understand, that’s the only one that won’t change.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. As a Housing Corporation, we’d like to see as many people in their own homes as possible. If you look at the houses that we’ve been providing over the years, we have 2,400 public housing units. I think through the years we’ve managed to get about 1,500 homeownership units starting from way back to the present. So we’ve put a lot of people into their own homes and we’re still trying to tailor some of our programs so we can get more people into their own homes.

We have to be careful. We’ve had a number of clients that have turned their units back over to the NWT Housing...

The $680,000 is not to actually build brand new units. We will take existing units in the community and we will retrofit them so they’re suitable for hard-to-house clients. Part of that money will be earmarked for working with a local organization who might want to run this particular program in the community for us. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The Member is correct; we have a lot of individual cases that we do deal with. The numbers have come down substantially in the last little while which, again, is a good indication that the work that a lot of people want done on their units is being carried out.

As far as the changes to PATH, the Member is absolutely correct. We’ve had issues in the past where somebody would be a dollar over the Core Need Income Threshold and they were automatically declined. We’ve tried to tailor our programs that if they are a little bit over, now it’s not going to be that they are automatically declined. We...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. To my right I have Mr. David Stewart, president of the NWT Housing Corporation. To my left I have Mr. Jeff Anderson, vice-president of finance and infrastructure, NWT Housing Corporation.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The Member is talking about the homeowners in the Sahtu. If you look at the number of homes that are in the Sahtu, initially those homes were provided by the NWT Housing Corporation or with assistance from the NWT Housing Corporation. We contributed greatly to homeownership not only in the Sahtu but across the Northwest Territories.

The Member talks about core need. Again, core needs is kind of a tough one to gauge. If you look at the numbers from the last one done in 2009, I think it said that – I can’t remember exactly what the numbers were – 35 percent was core need...