Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I want to follow up on my statement yesterday about housing as a human right by speaking about how we can better hold landlords and tenants accountable. When your landlord is an investment trust based far away that sees your building as a tiny blip on a balance sheet rather than a home or a community, it's very difficult to hold them accountable.
It is positive that over the past few years Housing NWT has been moving towards owning its own buildings and away from leases with monopolistic real estate trusts, but there are also local landlords violating people's rights, including in my riding.
The chief rental officer in her last several reports noted that existing mechanisms in the Residential Tenancies Act do not seem to deter landlords that are repeat offenders. She recommended changing the Act to allow for summary offence tickets with minimum fines.
Mr. Speaker, when it comes to troublesome tenants, there are limitations on the extent that legal processes can really hold people accountable. We can punish them, issue fines, evict them, even throw them in jail for short periods, but if they don't have any money and not much to lose, what have we accomplished? Have we really held them accountable?
One way forward is more supported group living options. The Housing First program for single adults here in Yellowknife adopted a scattered site model where people in the highest need, who may have been coming off the street, are issued apartments scattered across town, and they're expected to live independently. But this hasn't worked very well. People often struggle on their own, there are home takeovers and buildings get damaged.
For many years, the Yellowknife Women's Society has been proposing that Housing First be consolidated into one dedicated building where the organization can ensure better security and provide steady wraparound support every day. Honestly, I don't think it's the presence of security guards that will make a difference. It's when you intentionally create a sense of community, when you're surrounded by people who both care about you and call you out on your nonsense, that's when you develop a sense of accountability.
Mr. Speaker, everyone needs to live somewhere, but our housing system only works if both landlords and tenants treat the buildings as homes where we're accountable --
-- thank you, Member from Yellowknife North. Your time is up. Thank you. Members' statements. Member from Great Slave.
