Lucy Kuptana

Thank you, Madam Chair. Mr. Jim Martin here will provide more information with the HELP unit disposition. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Madam Chair. $50 million for one year. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Madam Chair, for that information, I'll ask President Kelly to speak on it.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We are planning, and we have to plan, but we have to continue to look for federal funding for this plan. Reached out to the Minister of Housing and Infrastructure Canada to talk about funding through the FERN* pot that was announced last year by the federal government. We continue to advocate for these funds through either PT meetings or FPT meetings, and I have a meeting coming up tomorrow, an FPT meeting. But in terms of finding the funds, these, we plan, but we, again, need to find the funds for this. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Madam Chair. With the 130 vacant housing units throughout the Northwest Territories, there's more vacant units but many of them, we don't have the funding for to modernize or improve those units. So with 130 units that are outlined, these are in the works of being updated or upgraded but it depends on funding. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Incremental plan meaning that we were looking at units across the Northwest Territories based on age of the housing units and also the need, utilizing the preliminary results of our territorial housing needs assessment. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Mr. Speaker, I'm willing to commit to meet with the Member to discuss this further. We do have funding available. It's called the community housing initiative funding. We could work with Indigenous governments or local government or bands to look at some of these opportunities and perhaps advance them in his riding. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And thank you to the Member for the question. His concern is my concern because living in small community, you drive around, you walk around, you see many units within the community that are boarded up or that have no windows or busted up windows. So this is something that we are working towards as Housing NWT is working within our community, working with Indigenous governments, to either remediate or demolish or modernize these homes.

So in terms of the question from the Member, we have 293 units in the Mackenzie Delta riding. 265 are occupied. We have one that is...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I completely agree that we need to remove many of these boarded up or derelict buildings. The situation is it's hard to get money for housing. It's even more difficult to remediate or demolish older housing units. Our budget for Housing NWT is $500,000 a year. We have 2900 units across the North. It costs up to $50,000 to remediate or demolish a unit considering the contaminants or the age of the unit, the space within the solid waste site, and sometimes we have to ship that material south. So it could be difficult but we are willing to look at partnerships. We are...

Mr. Speaker, it's not often I get a constituent from Nunakput here in the gallery, so I'd like to recognize Sandra, Sandra Elias, from the Aimayunga Women's Shelter in Tuktoyaktuk, so welcome Sandra and the entire shelter network. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.