Robert C. McLeod

Yes, Mr. Chair, I will, I would.

These are government assets and we work with the communities to advise them of best practices.

I think as you go travelling to more of the smaller communities, you’ll see the standards of building that they have put in. I think they’re being standard. If the Member’s looking for blueprints or plans, it’s maybe something that I would have to work with the communities to see what we can provide to the Member.

On the higher end of core need income threshold we have too many people that are over that that are deemed to be able to secure a mortgage or are not in need of any subsidy from the Housing Corp. But it is something that we continue to monitor and look at, because the Member is correct that in some of the smaller communities there might not be a level playing field as some of the market communities. So this is all information that we plan to do a program review of the whole housing choices portfolio. Thank you.

The line that I’ve repeated often is that I give the communities a lot of credit for putting in good quality infrastructure. We don’t regulate the standards, so we’d be unable to provide that information to the Member. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am assuming the Member is talking about homeownership units or public housing units. If it is a homeownership unit, as I stated on a couple of occasions, I have asked the corporation to be a little more flexible on how we allocate the units. The application process is done now, so the regions are just analyzing all the information and then we will be able to do the allocations. Thank you.

We could evaluate the infrastructure agreement, but it’s not our intent... I mean, we’re looking at three or four months to try and get this in. So it’s not our intent at this particular time to try and make an increase to the infrastructure budget until we do the overall evaluation. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Five years was the initial program. The initial review was going to come five years after that. I mean, who knows? It may be something that could be done, as the Member says, biannually. Five years, actually, was one that was agreed to in concert with the NWT Association of Communities. They felt that was a fair length of time, because there was a lot of responsibility devolved to the communities and thought five years would be a good indication of how this was working and doing a review and see where we need to go from there. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We’ll change the name from New Deal to Good Deal.

But going back to the streetlights, it’s the same thing as I responded to Mr. Menicoche. I mean, there are opportunities where the community can work with the Power Corp, but I take the Member’s point. Maybe we need to sit down with all parties that are affected by this, because it’s a whole ownership issue and that’s something that I think we need to clarify. So I would be willing to commit to the Member that I’ll try to get all the information clarified for him.

When you talk about settlement to hamlet, and even the...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. MACA will do what it can to work with the communities to assist them with some of the capacity challenges that they face working with LGANT and NWT Association of Communities. We’ve had the human resource plan that’s out there and it seems to be working well. We have people working with the smaller communities.

As far as the Member’s particular question goes, the actual formula for O and M, I’d be able to provide the details. The Member is right; it is quite complicated. It takes a lot of things into consideration. I have no problem providing the information to...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Part of the duties of the assistant fire marshal will be going into the communities and assessing some of their equipment, working with the communities to identify the life of their equipment, and possibly working with the communities to put that equipment into their capital plan. Obviously training, as the Member said, is huge. No point in having a fire truck in the community if you don’t have the training for it. That’s where we see in this part of the new program that I had mentioned to this House a few minutes ago, is training is a huge part of it and it’s...