Caroline Cochrane

Thank you, Mr. Chair. So currently right now and we at the Northwest Territories Housing Corporation are subsidizing all of public housing tenants, utility costs. Once the utility costs are transferred over after the three years, yes, we will definitely look at it an incentive program and training program so that people can actually be rewarded for conservation. It is important. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The costs for the local housing organizations is on page 354, administration and maintenance. Currently we do not have them broken down by riding, but if the MLA would like we can provide that to him tomorrow as well. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The Government of the Northwest Territories recognizes that we can't work in silos. We have two forms of committees. We have the deputy ministers who meet regularly for various committees, economic development, social causes, etc. We also have Ministers' committees, that we meet for the same economic development, social programs. I see jobs as economic development, but also taking care of people, which is a social program. We are trying to work really closely together across departments to provide the best services for people within the Northwest Territories. and specifically to help not only...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Yes, I will take my colleague's comment and say there are no tumbleweeds in the territory. What is the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs doing to help small community governments? The Department of Municipal and Community Affairs really works with community governments to basically deal with their infrastructure. We provide funding so that they can have clean water, so that they can have waste facilities, so that they can have emergency planning, fire services. We also provide a component so that they can build capital planning and programs that actually...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Yes, Municipal and Community Affairs does try to work with smaller communities as much as possible so that we can keep people in their communities. That is why we have a focus on sports and recreation. We also provide a lot of training so that people can operate their own, for example, water treatment centres. We offer training so that people can actually maintain them in their communities.

We do a circuit rider program that will go into the communities and actually provide one-on-one support to those people as well. We are looking at our training mechanism so that we...

The Auditor General's report actually gave us 13 recommendations. A lot of them were talking about things like waste management, fire safety, and emergency planning. Some of it that pertains, maybe, to the honourable Members' question are around our accountability framework so that we can actually provide questions so that we make sure that community governments are providing the services they need within their communities, and we have some way of verifying them as well.

The other thing that might be applicable is for the designated authorities, of which there are nine within the territories...

Yes, as stated previously, the department actually goes in and works with each community to develop a capital infrastructure plan that is used to apply for funding. We don't actually have public meetings on it, but we are available to each community as needed to go in and actually help them fill out their application process.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Department of Municipal and Community Affairs actually works quite closely with the municipal governments to access the funding, the infrastructure funding that is provided by the federal government, so we work one-on-one. We help them do their capital planning throughout the year; we identify areas that they might need to build more infrastructure on, and then we actually will sit and help them fill out the applications as needed. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, the Government of the Northwest Territories made a commitment in its mandate to support and participate in the National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls in collaboration with families, Aboriginal governments, the federal government, and other organizations. I would like to update Members today on the work our government is doing to fulfill that commitment.

The National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls was formally launched by the Government of Canada on September 1, 2016. Since my last update on this initiative, the national...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Again, all of the communities in the Sahtu region have applied and successfully applied for the infrastructure funding. We will be going into Colville Lake within the next two weeks to actually help them with their application. They are the only community in the Sahtu region that hasn't yet applied successfully.