Robert C. McLeod

Mr. Chair, maybe it was a slip on our part, because I know we were providing committee with an update on what we had planned to do, but the Member is correct; there were really no numbers attached to that. I can commit to the Member and Regular Members that we will put this information together. We will put some dollar figures to it, and then we’ll sit down with committee and they’ll have a better idea of exactly what we do plan on doing and how much, at the end of the day, that we’re thinking is going to save us.

I know we have sat with committee and said we are trying to reduce our public...

A lot of the programs, and most of the ones that were approved, were applications that we had received from these groups and we reviewed all the applications and disbursed the funding. We work with them and will probably get an application in. Thank you.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair. If you recall in the past, we did put a lot of HELP units on the ground. A lot of these HELP units in the communities were vacant because we didn’t have clients for them. I think we built a lot of them on specs that we were going to get the clients and it didn’t work out the way we had hoped, so our plan now is to… First of all, we’re not getting as many applications and clients approved as we would like, so we’ve turned a lot of these units into public housing and we’ve turned some into staff housing, we’ve rented them out wherever we can. So we realize that we may need...

I do, Mr. Chair.

It was implemented September 1st and our goal was to go to 175 and we’re going to phase them in. I think we’ve got 50 this year. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to welcome, from Aklavik, Mr. Charlie Furlong. I know she’s been recognized a couple of times before, but I also want to point out that Shirley was born in Aklavik, raised in Inuvik, a good Delta girl. Welcome.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We are increasing the amount of incentive we’re offering to local developers. As well, I think we’re going to be building some of these units ourselves. We’re working very closely – we just had a meeting recently – with the NWTTA. They’re doing, I think, a survey on the communities and what their needs are. So we’re working very closely with them so we can identify the communities that they may identify and we may identify as those in most need. Thank you.

We were working on a plan while this tragedy happened in the Yukon. Unfortunately, a tragedy like this brings the issue to the forefront, therefore, it gets a lot more publicity, but we didn’t wait until this report came out to do the work.

As I said, all 2,400 of our public housing units have working carbon monoxide detectors, so we’ve been proactive. We haven’t been reacting to the issues that happened in the Yukon and we will continue to be proactive on this issue. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Collection is probably one of the biggest ones because you find that the communities that have the lower collections are the ones that are having some trouble financially. Utilities might play a part in that because sometimes what you actually budget them for and what the utilities actually come in at, utility rates might rise. So that’s an issue. But collection, again, is one of the biggest ones. Thank you.