Caroline Cochrane

Mr. Speaker, today is International Women's Day, a day recognized throughout the world as a chance to celebrate women's progress towards achieving gender equality while identifying the challenges that still remain. In this spirit, I am pleased to discuss the Government of the Northwest Territories mandate commitment to support the delivery of workshops that help to get women into politics. In the Northwest Territories, women have largely been underrepresented in elected positions at all levels of government.

Mr. Speaker, we have made some progress in the Northwest Territories. I am pleased to...

The Government of the Northwest Territories does recognize universal child care as a very proactive option to address the obstacles, one of the obstacles, for women entering employment. As such, the Minister of the Department of Education, Culture and Employment is looking at universal child care as an option and seeing if it can be realized within our government.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Government of the Northwest Territories has done a few things, actually, to address the wage disparity between males and females. It was the last Assembly that actually increased the minimum wage. I hate to say that, but the majority of people making minimum wage happened to be women in society, so we have addressed that by slowly increasing that. I did hear from the Minister the other day as well that they were looking at more increases to that.

The other thing they have done is, many, many years ago, the Government of the Northwest Territories did a gender equity...

Actually, we do collaborate quite closely. We do have our electoral officer attend the campaign schools with us. We will have the Department of Justice actually attending with us also to give us some feedback on where we need to move more and in what direction. We are working quite closely with the Status of Women on this issue. We are trying to be as inclusive as possible with the whole direction of getting more women in leadership in politics.

Mr. Speaker, I'd like to recognize women in the House from Native Women's Annual General Meeting. These women are role models within their communities and they're here representing Indigenous women of the Northwest Territories. We have Liza Pieper, the president, she's from Detah/Yellowknife area; Annie Goose from Ulukhaktok is the vice-president; Mabel Brown from Inuvik is the Mackenzie Regional Director; Shirley Kisoun the Mackenzie delegate from Inuvik; Jane Weyallon from Behchoko is the Tlicho Regional Director; Jaylene Delorme is the territorial youth representative from Hay River...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to begin by recognizing the students who are in the House today and stating that you are our future, and one day we hope to see you sitting here. Then I want to move to talk about some of the NHL alumni who are visiting our gallery today. We have Shaun Van Allen, who has played with the Edmonton Oilers, Anaheim Ducks, Ottawa Senators, Dallas Stars, and the Montreal Canadiens.

We have John Chabot, who played with the Pittsburgh Penguins, the Montreal Canadiens, the Detroit Red Wings. We have Dan Frawley, who played with the Pittsburgh Penguins, the Chicago...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The partnership that we have developed with the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation is a partnership in that the Housing Corporation provides the land and will take over the ownership of the units for rental purposes, but the IRC is responsible for building the units and determining where they want to go. The current funding, the $5 million, will be used to replace a six-plex in Inuvik and a four-plex in Tuktoyaktuk that were burned from fire. The $10 million that is coming next, we have not negotiated on. Again, it is not the Housing Corporation's prerogative to be able to...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Northwest Territories Housing Corporation is looking forward to all of the ideas. We will be reviewing all suggestions that are provided with the survey, in the House, and any other way that we have gotten input, so everything will be reviewed.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Northwest Territories Housing Corporation has been working for many years, actually providing supports to seniors, to people so that they can stay in their communities. So the additional $500,000 that we put into the budget for this coming year is not a new program. It is new monies that we allocated to it, but we have been working for many years to provide supports to seniors so that they can age in place, putting mobility supports in. We have not done a formal evaluation, but there are a lot of evaluations out there that show that supports for seniors, rails...

The Northwest Territories Housing Corporation is working in close partnership with the Department of Health and Social Services. The goal is to help people to be able to age in place within their communities as long as possible; however, we do recognize that at some point some people do need additional support that they may have to leave their communities and at that point they may have to go into long-term care.