Robert C. McLeod

Thank you, Madam Chair. We’ve worked closely with the communities, and communities have provided us with their five-year capital plan, because they realize how much they’re getting over the next number of years so they do a good job in prioritizing their investments over the next five years. I was looking at them, actually earlier this morning, and they’ve done a great job in some of their priorities and even recognizing the fact that with development coming and that, you know, we’ve got to be ready for it. Again, it’s a decision that the community government makes.

We have assistant...

Thank you, Madam Chair. The Member raised a lot of interesting points. Again, we appreciate the support of the Member. The $835,000 he spoke of was an internal allocation to try and address some of the housing issues for professionals in the community. However, we’re looking forward to bringing forward initiatives to this Assembly, with the support of this Assembly, and we’re looking forward to bringing some initiatives forward that would help try and address some of the issues in a lot of the small communities that have challenges with housing for staff. So we’re looking at updating committee...

Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate the opportunity to respond. We appreciate the Member’s comments and he’s absolutely right; the communities have taken this responsibility. There have been some challenges, but for the most part they’ve done a fantastic job at determining their projects and their priorities, and you’re absolutely right when you say gone are the days when you tried to get your project into the capital system. So it’s been working and we’re quite pleased with how the communities have responded to the challenges of administering this themselves. They’ve done a great job. In...

I’m sorry. I apologize. I was so concentrating on the first point the Member made, I forgot about the second.

We are monitoring the one unit that we have up in Inuvik. We are able to monitor the use there as far as utilities go. I am committing to providing data to all the Members on some of the savings that we are seeing because of using a few more energy-efficient systems plus the work that we have done on the units themselves.

Right now it is fairly early in the game. We do have a new system where we are able to monitor the utility costs for pretty well every unit in the NWT Housing...

Thank you, Madam Chair. The Member is correct; the infrastructure budget itself hasn’t changed from the $28 million in 2000, but what we’ve done is we’ve heard from the communities and they are challenged, they are getting more and more buildings and they’re challenged with the O and M side of it. But we have made it a little more flexible with the capital budget where they’re able to use 10 percent towards their O and M.

As far as increasing the infrastructure budget, their biggest concern right now was the O and M side of it. We’re working with Canada to try to find out what our share of the...

Madam Chair, as far as biomass goes for this coming fiscal year, we don’t have it identified anywhere but we do have… It’s in the notes that we provided. There are some solar panel initiatives that are being undertaken this year that identifies a location. That could take place during 2014-15. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, today I would like to update the Legislative Assembly on changes to homeownership programs offered through the NWT Housing Corporation.

When we developed our strategic plan, Building for the Future, residents told us that we needed to examine our homeownership programs. They wanted us to recognize the different roles that homeownership plays in non-market and market communities. They told us we need to make these programs more effective.

Mr. Speaker, following our strategic plan, we have made significant changes to Providing Assistance for Territorial Homeownership, our main...

Mr. Speaker, I would like to recognize Kyla Larocque. Mr. Beaulieu just recognized her. Kyla just got married in April. Welcome to the gallery. I wish you and your colleagues best of luck as you pursue your nursing careers. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, the Accountability Framework for Community Governments is now complete. This framework will be an important tool that will allow MACA and community government stakeholders to better coordinate our working relationship based on defined indicators that measure the health and success of community governments.

It builds on the New Deal and emphasizes the importance of responsible and responsive community governments. It provides tools, in the form of standardized key indicators and checklists to ensure they are being met, that community governments can use to assess their performance...

Mr. Speaker, the Department of Transportation has committed to trying to keep the ferry crossing at Tsiigehtchic opened for as long as possible, where there is no interruption in service, so that would be a huge help.

However, in the event that something does happen, we have to deal with it then. I do know that it will cost the NWT Housing Corporation and this government approximately $5 million to convert all our units back to diesel in the event that we have to. It’s not something that we would like to do. We would like to work with, obviously, the community and the suppliers to keep a...