Alfred Moses

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, this government has committed to working in partnership with other governments to address affordable housing requirements in support of their service delivery to Northwest Territories residents. The Northwest Territories Housing Corporation has made progress in meeting this mandate commitment in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region.

The Northwest Territories Housing Corporation and the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation have entered into a Memorandum of Agreement that reflects our shared goals of affordable, adequate, and suitable housing for Inuvialuit and...

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

Yes, Mr. Chair. On my left, I have Mr. Kevin Brezinski, director of public safety with the Department of MACA, and on my right, Mr. Ian Rennie, legislative counsel with the Department of Justice. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Yes, Mr. Chair, I am here to introduce Bill 8, Emergency Management Act. I would like to thank the Standing Committee on Government Operations for their review of this bill.

The purpose of the Emergency Management Act is to repeal and replace the Civil Emergency Measures Act. The act defines the roles and responsibilities of local authorities and the Government of the Northwest Territories in planning for, responding to, and recovering from emergencies.

The proposed amendments permit us to effectively modernize emergency management arrangements for the Northwest...

As this legislation just came through, I know there was concern about funding for all communities across the Northwest Territories. As the Member knows, we just recently did have an election and we are going to be reaching out to the new mayors, the new councils, the new NWTAC, if there's going to be an NWTAC board, and have these kinds of discussions with them. We knew this legislation was going to be coming in. We had discussions and concerns brought up at our last meeting, when Cabinet did meet with the NWTAC. We will continue work with the local government administration, as well, and make...

Yes, that is a very good idea. With my other hat, the Housing Corporation, we are looking at developing some signage and communication to get out to all our public housing units. I know the Department of Health and Social Services is working on some really good education and awareness information. So we will work with our committee to see what we can develop, and we do have some really good training opportunities, where we can go online and do some kind of, like, eLearning workshops with our regional centres, so that is a very interesting concept. We will make sure that our interdepartmental...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, we are part of the interdepartmental committee overseeing the implementation of cannabis legislation here in the Northwest Territories. One thing that we are doing, though, is looking at having a conference and bringing in people from each of the communities to attend the conference and looking at addressing any community governance concerns, hamlets, communities, bands. I will be looking at striving to support the community governments and their understanding of this legislation or any concerns that they might have.

Now, we are looking at having this...

As I mentioned, the community housing support initiative is, I think, the program that would well suit what the Member is asking. We would be willing to sit down with leadership, sit down with contractors, sit down with the Member. We do have some good partnerships in some of his communities already, and, as I mentioned, one good partnership that we have is with a lot of our Indigenous organizations. IRC and Salt River First Nations are a couple that I can think of. We would be more than willing to sit down with the Member and his leadership to try to look at addressing some of the housing...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. First and foremost, I do know that building log homes has been done in the past up in the region, and that there were some successful projects with that. If we were going to look at such a pilot or project moving forward, they would have to meet national building codes, first and foremost. Also, as you know, we have had some debate in this House in the last government and this government about even just modular and stick homes, and that is another concern for residents up in our region. If we were going to look at log homes, it would be having to meet the national...

Of course, we want to work with all of our communities, our stakeholders, our residents in the NWT, and one of the programs that we have here that has been working very well here in Yellowknife is working with Habitat for the NWT, and we want to make sure that we want to try to get that program out to outside of Yellowknife. The first community we are looking at is actually Behchoko. If we can get people in the regions, in the small communities, to work on something like the Habitat for Humanity projects, then definitely we will look into that. You know, each community is going to be different...