Caroline Cochrane

Thank you, Mr. Chair. At this point, we do not know when the last time an increase was made to the consumer affairs portion of the department. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. At this point, we are not willing to do that. We received funding from the federal government to develop some online workshops for Aboriginal governments, and so we are in the middle of that process, and so at this point, no, we are not going to disrupt our services. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

On my left I have Eleanor Young. She is the deputy minister for Municipal and Community Affairs. On my right is Gary Schauerte. He is the director of Corporate Affairs.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. With the New Deal in 2007, it is up to communities to decide what they are using their funds for. We provide the funds to the communities. They decide within their capital planning process what type of infrastructure they would like, whether it is an arena or youth centre, whatever it may be, swimming pool, et cetera, and then they use the operating and maintenance funding that we provide them as well to be able to operate those facilities. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The NGO Stabilization Fund is actually one that I am very familiar with. It is a resource very critical to these social agencies, the non-government social agencies within communities in the Northwest Territories. It was presented during the capital planning process.

There was a bit of miscommunication. It was promoted as it was really to support volunteers. That is a little bit incorrect. The assumption is that non-government organizations do use a lot of volunteers for their boards. A lot of the boards actually have to have volunteers. They cannot be paid positions. The...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It is really hard to determine how long somebody will remain homeless. At the same time, while we are looking at the policy and the program review, we are trying to address homelessness through a variety of ways. We have put money into the Housing First project in Yellowknife. We are building semi-independent rooms within the current shelters. We are building units within the communities. We are working on homelessness at the same time there is the policy review.

The deciding of the wait list is a little bit more complicated than deciding if you have children or not. There are a lot of factors that go into that, such as what is your current living situation, are you in harm's way at this point. Number of children do count in that, but there are a lot of other factors besides just whether you have children or not.

As I stated earlier, we have a huge number of people in need within the Northwest Territories as a whole. We have over 600 families with children that do fall within our current income assessment. At this point, I am not willing to expand the income thresholds as they currently are. If we ever get to the place where we can address all of the low-income people within the Northwest Territories, then I would look at expanding that, but at this current point we cannot.

It probably won't be a big leap to actually develop this program. It would be a program on its own. Public housing is still a need, and we will still be looking at that. However, we do currently provide a transitional rent supplement program that is ineffective because it ends after two years and, in my opinion, people don't often have the skills that they need or the income to be able to be left without that support. So instead of having a transitional rent support program, it's merely transferring it over and actually having more of a long term. Like I said, it is more cost effective to...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In an effort to try to keep as many of the Regular MLAs saying that I am their favourite Minister, what I will do is I will add these changes to the list of acts and regulations that we will be bringing to the five communities to review it on their priority list so that the communities actually can delegate which are the priorities, which ones we should be dealing with first. Then I can bring that back to the MLAs.