Caroline Cochrane

The RCMP will pay 100 per cent of the assessed rent within each community.

Yes. As stated, I do realize that many of the programs are old and many of them might not be appropriate at this time. I adhere to the priority of the 18th Legislative Assembly that says we need to be transparent, and within doing that, then, I believe that the best philosophy is to ask the community and to develop a plan based on what the communities and the people that use the programs say they need.

The priority for the RCMP housing would be non-market communities where there are no landlords that provide it. Those would be the first ones that we would be looking at.

Currently, it costs about $18,000 to $20,000 a year to provide the operating and maintenance provision for public housing. For every unit that we rent out, we would be able to support that cost.

If the Member would like to meet with me any time this week, then we would coordinate our schedules and see what times works good for both of us.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The department is actually, at this point, compiling a listing of all of the housing that we have available. Right now, we have no housing available for public housing. Just to let people know, the buildings that people see boarded up are scheduled for demolition, it’s expensive to do that, or else they are public houses owned by the community members, but we can provide a list of those houses that the corporation owns that are empty. Thank you.

The agreement with the federal government was to look at the housing for RCMP territory-wide. We are, however, willing to meet with the SCOSD committee to be able to review it and see if they would like changes to it.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The federal government, as people know, is getting out of the staff housing for the RCMP. They approached the NWT Housing Corporation. We look at this as two things. One is that to retain employment within our communities, we need to have housing for the RCMP to be in the communities. The other thing is it will be a revenue resource. With the declining CMHC funding, we are looking at the revenue that would come from that to be able to transfer into the operating and maintenance for public housing. Thank you.

As stated earlier, the initiative is not to displace public housing. It is a revenue source to be able to supplement the public housing. I also can give you some information on the federal units that the RCMP had. At this point, the federal government is saying that they’re beyond repair for them to make them financially viable. They will be offering them out to market. If they are not taken up by the market within the communities, then they’ll send them to negotiations with the Housing Corporation.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As previously stated in my answers, the benefit of the Housing Corporation taking on this initiative is that we will retain RCMP officers within the communities and we can use the market rent that we will be charging them to subsidize the operating maintenance costs to the public housing considering that the CMHC funding will be dissolving. Thank you.