Robert C. McLeod

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We do have a few empty houses in Fort Providence. There are a number of reasons people are evicted. Arrears is one of them. There could have been noise and disturbance, and a number of other issues that they are evicted from public housing. Usually there is opportunity there for them, if they enter into some kind of agreement, to try and get back on to the public housing waiting list and hopefully back into public housing.

Our goal as NWT Housing Corporation is to house people, not to evict them. But at the same time, as a partnership, they have to work with us. Many...

We will have a discussion within the department and then we can further that up with a discussion, if need be, with the folks in Yellowknife, because they do have a lot of qualified personnel here.

At the end of the day, our goal is to have qualified first responders in many of the highway communities in the Northwest Territories, then they would be better equipped dealing with emergencies such as this and other such emergencies involving vehicles on the highway.

Mr. Speaker, today I am pleased to speak about the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs’ upcoming Good Governance Conference. This year’s conference theme is Community Ownership. The conference will take place at the Explorer Hotel in Yellowknife from February 26th to 28th and 165 participants representing all 33 communities are expected to attend.

Mr. Speaker, our 33 community governments play a vital role in the sustainability and strength of our territory. MACA, through the School of Community Government, continues to support them as they build capacity to address their increased...

We would have to look at that. Ultimately, our goal in the Northwest Territories Housing Corporation is to try and see as many homeowners as possible. We have to recognize, also, that there is always going to be a need for public housing and public housing clients. It’s a bit of a balancing act and we have to weigh those out. Ultimately, we’d like to get people into home ownership. Some of the changes that we want to make now will probably have long-term effects and we’ll have to wait until 2038, if things don’t change by then, to see where the Northwest Territories is at as far as providing...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. First of all I want to correct the Member. The Member will be 79 years old in 2038, because I’ll be 78. We continue to raise this issue with our counterparts in Ottawa. We try to get them to see the fact that it is affecting how we administer public housing. I think, between now and then, if they don’t move on this, a lot of decisions may have to be made within the Housing Corporation and the government as to what exactly we want to be. Do we want to be just a social housing provider, or continue with all the programs that we offer now?

We have made some changes to our Home Ownership Program. We’re actually just in the process of putting a Minister’s statement together in which we will make the announcement within the next week or so. But the Member is correct, though; there has been a great concern across the Northwest Territories about the number of vacant units. I believe that at one particular time we had 130 vacant units, and that was because we were taking advantage of the federal infrastructure money and getting these units on the ground, and we were left with a situation where we have allotted many more units than...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to recognize my wife of 34 years and the most patient woman in the world. Judy, welcome to the gallery.

As I mentioned before, we do have the Building for the Future, a strategic framework for housing that we just recently completed. In there it talks about a lot of the ways that we want to deal with the declining CMHC funding. Also, the Member talked about communities. We’ve had communities in the past that have taken on the responsibility of administering their own public housing and realized that it was a lot more than they had bargained for, so they had turned the administration back over to the NWT Housing Corporation. We’re always open to partnerships. I think we’ve proven that in the past...

We do have our Building for the Future, the Northwest Territories strategy for housing looking into the future. There probably is a lot of work that’s going on nationally. A lot of the communities and jurisdictions down south, I think, are going to feel the effect a lot more than we are because their public housing and social housing portfolios are much larger than ours. It is a great concern across this country, not only for us but it affects us quite a bit because we have a majority of our houses, especially in the small communities, that are public housing partly funded by the money that we...

Mr. Speaker, I’ll have the information to the Member by the end of day Monday. Thank you.