Alfred Moses

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.

As I mentioned in my Minister's statement, as well, we are looking at doing a needs assessment with all of our communities and community housing plans. We would also encourage the private sector to invest in affordable housing. We do have the Community Support Initiative that we can work with, whether it is Indigenous governments or private industry. The Co-Investment Fund is another opportunity that we can work on addressing these issues. I encourage the private industry to reach out to us at the NWT Housing Corporation to have those discussions. Obviously, if we can get other partnerships...

I have made statements in the House on all the programs, the initiatives that we are doing through the NWT Housing Corporation, and I appreciate the Member making some good comments with our LHOs, our district offices, as well, trying to get out to the communities to address the needs and the maintenance and the operations, which is always a big issue. We are trying to address those, as well. Even, we are working with people who are in the home ownership.

The Member had mentioned senior housing. We do have a senior housing planning study that we are going to be using to look at where we need to...

As I mentioned in a previous response, we will look at working with our leadership and our local membership in the communities to address any kind of emergency-management situations and how we deal with those.

Also, with planning community plans, we are going to be working with our community leadership to develop them so that it does mitigate any kind of emergency risks right across the Northwest Territories. Obviously, we have seen over the last few years situations up in our coastal communities that do have an impact. I have brought it up to our federal Minister. I have also brought it up to...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. First of all, I just want to thank the leadership and the people of the community of Paulatuk who stepped up to the plate during this past weekend, when we had winds that reached up to about 140 kilometres per hour, to take care of our elders, our youth, and those most vulnerable in the community.

Mr. Speaker, the new territorial Emergency Management Act does require communities to update their emergency plans annually. Our staff also do a great job in coordinating and working with our leadership to make sure that these plans are updated on a regular basis and that they...

Currently, the Government of the Northwest Territories does have some applications in place here for the disaster mitigation funding, which are being looked at. We are hoping to get a positive answer on that. I have also, most previously at our federal-provincial-territorial meetings, brought up the concern that we need to continue looking at other sources of funding that will impact our northern communities. I will continue to work with the leadership, our federal leadership, to make sure that they know what kind of funds they can access and work on developing those applications and ensuring...

The Department of Municipal and Community Affairs will continue to work closely with community governments to update the NWT Hazard Identification Risk Assessment. We will also continue to lobby our federal counterparts to look at increasing funding or continuing some of the funding that we have used in the past years to mitigate any type of emergency situations. We will obviously continue working with our leadership and working with our community members. That will address some of these emergency issues moving forward.