Alfred Moses

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I am pleased to introduce Bill 31, Northwest Territories 911 Act. The purpose of the Northwest Territories 911 Act is to create a Northwest Territories 911 service for the reporting of emergencies through a public safety answering point or call centre.

Bill 31 requires communities, communications providers, and emergency service providers to participate in the establishment and operation of the 911 system, which is necessary for its effective operation throughout the Northwest Territories.

Bill 31 authorizes development and administration of policies, standards, and...

Just really quickly, Mr. Chair. I want to thank the previous Ministers who worked on this bill. Obviously, I thank my staff, who did the hard work, went out, and did the consultation. I would like to thank the Chair for the comments that were made before we got into the proceedings of the bill and the work we have done collectively when we went through the clause-by-clause review. One thing that was important in the report was the comments from the municipal leaders and make sure that we take that into consideration. I just wanted to thank everybody involved. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Yes, I do.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We really appreciate the work that was done by committee on the reports in bringing these three motions forward as well as the discussion that we had in committee. We know this is very important. We have to make sure that all of our communities and our municipals are ready and prepared when we do this implementation. As this is a recommendation to Cabinet, I will be abstaining from the vote, as the previous motion. However, I just want to let committee know and Members and the general public that Cabinet is very supportive in the rollout of the 911 services. Being the...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. To those units that were affected, I know they were built by us and built to stand, but you can never predict when you can get 140-kilometre winds that are going to have an impact on, in some cases, our aging units, so moving forward, we need to address that. I know the Member asked questions in the House earlier this sitting, and as we move forward with our community housing plans and our relationship with the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation, these things do need to be taken in consideration because I know, in the last couple of years, Paulatuk in particular, the coastal...

Okay, I will try to be really quick. I know he answered quite a bit, but obviously one of the couple of things that we are doing is the lease-to-own program. We want to make sure that people who are in public housing can have that opportunity to lease to own, and then that would help us create more public housing inventory. We are also looking at the new home ownership program. Every year, we are doing 50 disposable units so that, when we demolish units, we are able to create more. The Member makes a good point. We want to create a market, but at the same time we don't want to disrupt some of...

We will commit to that.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. That was a really good story on the young gentleman in Colville Lake. We do have programs for people who want to build their own homes. Obviously, we have to look at building codes, for one thing, and also tenants to provide some of their own funding to get the place up and running. Our district officers, who are technical and program staff, they are getting out to the communities. I know that, while they go through a couple of community tours, regional tours, that we did promote getting our district offices technical staff and program staff out to promote the programs...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. On my left is our president and CEO of the NWT Housing Corporation, Mr. Tom Williams. On my right is Mr. Jim Martin, the vice president of finance and infrastructure services.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Yes, that's the emergency shelters program. Our thinking around that was to have all programs under one department so it will be easier for applications to be processed with our partnerships. Thank you.