David Krutko

Sergeant-at-Arms, please escort the witnesses in.

For the record, Mr. Minister, can you introduce your witnesses?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I note that there’s the Education, Culture and Employment public housing rent supp. I’m just wondering if that would be changed to simply refer to the public housing rent supp and remove the wording “Education, Culture and Employment” and how soon are we going to see that change.

Minister of Housing.

Robert C. McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, in regard to the infrastructure acquisition plan, these units are allocated or were approved in the budget on the basis of these units being approved. Because something that frustrates me is when you have regional staff telling people in the communities you may not be getting those units. I don’t think it’s up to those people at the regional level to make that decision. The decision is made here in this Legislature. We’re the ones that are approving this budget. I think it’s frustrating for myself to get phone calls from local people saying, sorry, those...

Just in regard to one of the items that you have on this page, this talks about research. I know that we had a pilot project a number of years ago called the log housing initiative program and I think that a lot of good work was done under that where you actually had people trained and you brought people in that were professionals on building logs houses. I’d just like to know exactly where is that program by way of moving forward. I think that a lot of communities are still requesting that we have such an initiative by way of log housing initiatives. We’ve built houses in communities...

Okay. With that, we’ll take a short break and then come back to deal with the Housing Corporation.

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Yes, I think the question is a board, a local housing authority board, there is no board in Tsiigehtchic and I believe Paulatuk is in the same boat. So I’m just wondering what would it take to reinstate a local housing authority board, because we do have that throughout the Territories, but for some reason the board was taken away. So I’d just like to know what’s the chance of reinstating that in other communities that may have lost their boards, because we do have more units on the ground than we had before. I think, if anything, that that was the argument before. I think we do supply most...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I, too, will be supporting the motion. I, for one, feel, as I’ve stated many times in this House, that a government is measured by how it treats its most vulnerable in our society. What we’re seeing statistically and looking at the results of what poverty does, just look out in our large cities with regard to homelessness, people having to go to food banks, people having to go to relatives’ homes and sleeping on their couch because they have nowhere else to go, visiting each other so you can share the food that you have with a family member, or in some cases having the...

Moving on to page 10-36, information item, work performed on behalf of others. Any questions?