Don Stewart

That is certainly something we could do, but obviously there’s a fixed number of units that we have available in the Northwest Territories. So if we were to add eight in Fort Resolution, we would have to take eight away from another community and I suspect there would be concerns raised about taking eight units away from another community. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The unit was empty at the time, I believe, of the needs survey. I would point out, though, that between 2009 and 2014 the core need in Fort Resolution in 2009 was 50 percent of dwellings and in 2014 it was 24.6 percent of dwellings. So I think there has been a fair amount of progress in that community in terms of addressing core need.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. There’s a number of programs we have in terms of the homelessness. I will just quickly go through them. The first ones are obviously the Homelessness Assistance Fund, which is about $125,000 per year and it provides support to individuals who are homeless or at risk of homelessness in terms of getting them out of that circumstance.

We have the Small Community Homelessness Fund which provides support for community organizations that are in our smallest communities that are providing things like soup kitchens as well as food banks, those sorts of activities, and we can...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just to add on, certainly the Teachers’ Association was an important part. We also work with our Department of Human Resources to understand where there were vacancies, for example in communities where there were barriers in the past in terms of being able to recruit people for services in those communities. Then we looked at our own stock in terms of where we may have existing units that are vacant or where there is particularly high demand to help sort of come up with the overall allocation of those 100 units by community. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The Hay River one first. Yes, the solar panels we put up were well above the five, but we really didn’t spend too much with that concern. That was the larger size where we felt we were going to get our biggest return for it. We are look at putting some metering on that so we can understand this system better. As the Member knows, these investments are really useful as ways of being able to test some of the impacts of these units. We are going to put some metering on that unit so we can understand when we are producing excess power, and then after a year or so we will look...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Yes, there are three units in Detah and three in Ndilo that we are planning on converting to public housing. We’re working with the LHO now to identify units that will go off the stock, some of the older units that are there. I know there is a big desire in the communities as well as on our part to get that finished, but we have to also respect that people are living in units. So, it’s not easy necessarily to move folks around, but we are working directly with the LHO to get them into the public housing stock. Thanks, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. When we first started planning for the new seniors complexes in the smaller communities, we really looked at a couple of different variables. Of course, we looked at the seniors population themselves by community and looked at where the growth is in that area.

We have got about 280 or so targeted public housing units for seniors now, so we looked at which communities those are in and looked for communities that may be underserved in terms of the existing independent living facilities that are targeted at seniors in those smaller communities. Through that we were able to...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. In terms of the standards, as the Member alluded to, there is a number of pieces of legislation that help define how the shelter should operate that we think covers most of the issues that have been raised in the past. That said, though, there is certainly also opportunity in contribution agreements for specific program delivery to lay out specific approaches to operating that may address some of the other concerns. It becomes a bit of question as to whether standards and regulations of those sorts of things are the best way to tackle those issues, or whether it is better...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just very quickly on a couple of the issues raised by the Member. Prioritization in terms of allocation of units, we do have a standard system that we use that allocates people to available units. We do give extra points on that system for people that are in homeless situations or people that are in family violence situations, for example. I think that’s reasonable in terms of, you know, those are situations that you want to try to address as quickly as possible compared to others that maybe have housing that they would like to get into their own unit but that aren’t...

Thank you, Madam Chair. Over time, the Housing Corporation has – probably over the last eight to 10 years – accumulated some working capital that we use for dealing with project overruns and those sorts of things. That value in our financial statements has been growing over time and that’s a good thing, but we also didn’t want to sit on a bunch of cash that could be put back into housing. So we are doing that reinvestment now to get that working capital level down to what I would consider more standard kinds of levels, and those are the investments you are seeing over the next few years that...