Alfred Moses

In most cases, the organizations that do apply for and receive funding through the NGO Stabilization Fund are receiving core funding through social envelope departments such as the Department of Health and Social Services, in some cases Education, Culture and Employment. Really, in most cases, these are programs aimed at providing direct support for our residents across the Northwest Territories, through my department, Municipal and Community Affairs. As I mentioned, right now, we don't see any type of funding programs that would offer any type of core funding to the organization in question.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and yes, I do agree with that statement and that the SPCA does play an important role throughout the Northwest Territories in managing dog control. In Inuvik, we have a very active SPCA group as well that does a lot of good work in the region and for the communities. At the same time, Mr. Speaker, I do have to say that I do believe that our community governments also have to play a very important role in terms of managing dog-control issues that are local to the communities and that we all have got to work together to address the issue that the Member has raised in his...

I really appreciate the work that the SPCA does throughout the Northwest Territories as well as our local SPCA groups in the communities where they do the work. I've also mentioned this is also the responsibility of our community governments, our municipal governments. We will be working with them. I can be prepared to provide my support in terms of speaking with the NWT Association of Communities. We will be having a meeting coming up this month, and I know this has been an issue for the Member and the SPCA, as well. I will make sure that this topic will get addressed at the next NWT...

I will just take, for example, the partnership that we have with the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation. That is a great partnership that we have developed with them. It is a good opportunity, as well, to share with other Indigenous governments as well as private industry on how we can work to address whether it is market rent or public housing needs, transitional housing.

This co-investment fund, like I have mentioned, we did get a $60 million carve-out on that. It was application-based and very flexible on how we spend those dollars. We want to make sure that information gets out to anybody, any...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As Members know, and when we go and visit our constituents, sometimes one of our biggest issues is finding housing for our nurses, RCMP, teachers, and we want to try to address that. The Housing Corporation typically is the sole housing provider in some of our rural and remote communities. Sometimes, our developers have a hard time doing business or building houses. At the same time, we don't want to be disrupting the market unit. We have tried in some communities and we have had some contractors bring concerns.

One thing that I can tell the Member, as the Members know...

As I mentioned, we are going to be getting information from our local leadership and our local membership on what their priorities are in their community. That way, it can help us better identify where we are going to put our investments as a government, and the investments that we got from the federal government, how we are going to be spending those dollars to meet the needs of each of the communities as we roll out these community housing plans. That is going to take input from our local leadership, our local membership, our stakeholders, and working with our partners to address the housing...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As I mentioned in my Minister's statement, the overall plan is to get a community housing plan in all of our 33 communities. Right now, we have six. We have three that we have actually signed agreements to participate in, and I mentioned those. They were Whati, Fort Liard, and Paulatuk. We are working with another three communities; Deline, Jean Marie, and K'atlodeeche First Nations.

As we have been getting these programs, we only have so much staff to get out and work on facilitating these community plans. They have been doing a great job getting into the communities...

One of the opportunities I will have this week is to bring up such concerns as that with our federal government to look and see how we can access more funding for education, creating awareness, a promotional campaign, and I think that all jurisdictions will probably have the same type of focus when we have the meeting on that agenda item. We are also going through a territorial sports strategy and working with our partners, as well as our territorial sport organizations. I think this is the time to have those discussions and I encourage anyone who might be going through something like this. It...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, before I begin, I just want to thank the Member for bringing this very serious and disturbing issue to Members of the House, as well as all our residents across the Northwest Territories. I can assure the Member that the department and the organizations that we do work with do support the Northwest Territories athletes and that we take the responsibility related to the protection of our youth and those who are participating, whether it's in sport, recreation, or even in the arts, very seriously.

Our current requirements include the necessity for coaches to...

Yes, we are already doing that. We have reached out to private sector. We are having partnerships. We are doing some pilot projects across the Northwest Territories. We are learning from some past decisions that were made and have taken a better approach to ensure that our investments, the dollars that we are spending, is going as far as they can and meeting the needs of our housing situations throughout the NWT. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.