Caroline Cochrane

Thank you, Madam Chair. At this point, I am not willing to name them because they are not settled. It would be inappropriate for me to say, "These are going to be settled," and then I go into a meeting and I get slaughtered. It is like, "What do you mean?" We have a few that are fairly close, but they change day by day because one that we thought was close wanted to be off the table. I had to go and mend the relationship and say, "Come back." That same one is back on the table. It is impossible to say that. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Perhaps I will clarify, and I won't have to come back and give an explanation. The original, when we did the needs assessment of the deficits in the municipal governments was done by need. There was no per capita. It was, "What do you need in your community? Do you need a water treatment plan? Do you need a sewer plan? Do you need roads?" It is by need. It has always been by need. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Madam Chair. That is the issue. It is an issue I struggled with for many years. That is why I came in to be an MLA in the first place, was because of housing and working with homeless people. This is my passion. We cannot increase the number of public-housing stock. In 2038, the operating maintenance money is gone. On average, we are spending $22,500, I believe, unless it has changed in the last two years. That was when I was two years ago as the housing Minister, $22,000 on average for every single public housing unit is what it cost the GNWT. We can't increase that stock because...

Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate the passion. I don't take it as anger or anything. I know that we all have passion. I appreciate the Member's words. This is close to my heart, too. We will move it as fast as we can, in a respectful manner, not trying to cram it down people's throats, but actually working in the consensus model. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, and thank you, Member, for giving the examples. You're absolutely right. One thing that I would like to say, within our definition of how we would do it, we do talk about Makerspaces. There are a lot of artists in our smaller communities. That will help them as well.

The other thing is that a lot of times these mandates overlap. We talk about increasing childcare spaces. In that way, we're talking about our income support and housing policies that say you can't operate childcare in your house. Those will bring employment in. If we need to deal with the lack of childcare in some of...

Thank you, Madam Chair. That is why I didn't commit to settling every single one of them. They have been on the plate, some of them, for 30 years. We have committed to doing business differently. Like I said, I have talked to the Indigenous governments. I have met with a couple of them now. I have been saying the same thing I said in the House the other day. I have been telling them, "I don't see us as federal government, GNWT, and Indigenous governments. I see us as federal, GNWT, and Indigenous all working together at the table." I talked about meeting with them after because it has only...

Thank you, Madam Chair. What I would like to expand on is, we talked about $5 million, but if you look down further, we are talking about a process to transfer lands. There is a value to lands, when we put that in. For example, when I was the -- I can't remember which Minister I was at the time, but we brought in the hotel tax so that communities could actually take that tax and actually implement that, and it's still not off the ground.

Like the Member had said, we need to work with the governments. We can give it to them, but my worry is, we're going to give them land; we're going to make...

Thank you, Madam Chair. On my right is Mr. Martin Goldney. He is the Cabinet secretary and the deputy minister for Executive and Indigenous Affairs. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Madam Chair. If the Member can actually meet with me later and maybe talk, I'm open to talking. I mean we have it in our mandate. It is a priority. We are going to have a working group. Terms of reference will be done. I'm not sure why it's stuck in AIP, which is an agreement-in-principle, because is it the terms of reference we want or an agreement-in-principle? We haven't even settled all the agreements in principle with Indigenous governments. That might end up being a block. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We have a small community fund, actually, that we provide to communities to start their own jobs or skill development. I think that I have said already in this House, when I was the Minister, my difficulty was -- and I have said that vocally, and I will keep saying that -- we tend to throw out money. It's like, "Here's $5 million; spend it," and then people would get two weeks here and two weeks there, and so I have been saying for the last year or so, when I started to realize that this wasn't a good idea, I have been talking to communities and saying, "Instead of...