Caroline Cochrane

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Yes, I would like to be able to say, yes, we do consider it. There have been a few mistakes on the department's side. We were asked many years ago to actually bring in market housing to the communities to support professionals, nurses, doctors, social workers, school teachers. The reality is once we did the assessment, and then it took a couple years to actually build the units there, some of the gaps were filled. So we're actually currently looking at the communities that have market rentals we're actually looking at our own rentals and seeing if we can reallocate...

Yes. At this point, yes, we will be. We actually have already called a meeting of the five sports organizations, so we're going to sit down, we're going to talk about the overlap that there may be and gaps within services and to try to help them with their long-term planning and also the planning that we need to do within the MACA, Municipal and Community Affairs, itself. So, yes, I can commit to that. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Actually, at this point we won't consider to go back and look at lowering the average of the years, and that is based on knowledge that we have. The Sport and Recreation Council used to control the funding, and their contributions for 2014 to 2017, so that was the three years, were based on ticket sale projections that were not achieved. This resulted in reduced contributions for 2015-2016 and 2016-2017. So using the five-year base for the funding is actually more appropriate; people can more count on what they're getting. So we have promised to every organization that...

The units that I've talked about, the pilot project, are actually managed by communities themselves. They are not managed by the housing corporation. As stated before, this is a pilot project, and so we're going to do an analysis to see how they work. After a year and at that point we'll determine whether we continue with that model or if we have to change our model to more accommodate the needs.

Mr. Speaker, housing costs are a major component of the cost of living, which we all know is very high here in the Northwest Territories. Bringing these costs down is a priority. The Northwest Territories Housing Corporation will be putting out a housing engagement survey that will help us find out how we can design and deliver programs that better meet people’s housing needs.

The Northwest Territories Housing Corporation’s current strategic plan, Building for the Future, was created based on feedback received from residents. That feedback let us make changes to several of the Housing...

Those units are only for single people within the Northwest Territories. In the same manner that we have units that are designated only for seniors we will have units that are designated only for singles.

Our first step actually is to do a thorough analysis of the audit and look at the recommendations that are in that. The other thing that we are doing actually, and just implementing currently, again is we are asking all of our staff within the Municipal and Community Affairs for suggestions on ways to improve, and that includes the recommendations within the audit. So until that work is done then I can't commit to doing a zero-based review.

There's a number of factors that actually stand in the way of -- it's not that we don't fulfil our mandate it's maybe we're not progressing and maybe not doing as much paperwork as we need to, so there are some issues. Municipal and Community Affairs is based on -- years ago we changed it into what's called a "New Deal" and that is really about community development. It's about empowering the communities to acknowledge what their strengths are and their needs are; which is something I really support. So we do try to provide training and support to them.

One of the other challenges that we have...

I should clarify. When I say mistakes were made, it's not that we made a mistake in asking if we needed them at the time. It's just that it does take a couple of years for us to do the business plan and then get the units constructed, so we did err in that way. But it wasn't a mistake to put the units in.

Can we consult on the small communities? Absolutely. We are just in the process, like I had done in my Minister's statement earlier, that we're in the process of rolling out our engagement survey, which will ask each community what type of housing that they need in their community. Thank you...

I can't confirm the actual market rental in Fort Providence itself because each community is different, but I can confirm that as part of this survey, and actually even before the survey, we are conducting a total review of all of our rental for accommodations in every single community, so we're in the process of doing that now.