Don Stewart

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just to clarify with the Member, are you on 5-43 or 5-45?

Last year we constructed a number of HELP units in Nahendeh that we haven’t been able to allocate yet, so rather than build more, we’re waiting until we were able to allocate those units before we start to build additional stuff for vacant units. We have some vacant units there that we’re waiting for some program intake, and then we’ll be able to go back and build some additional units. Thank you.

I think the Member has it right. On the public housing side we have a really good tracking system of knowing the age of our stock, when it’s scheduled for a retrofit, for example. We also have the condition ratings that are done on an annual basis, which helps us identify units that are most in need. That one I think we have a really good solid tracking system to know scheduling. The districts work closely with the communities to help finalize those plans to know which ones we’re going to do and what our plans are going forward.

On the home ownership side, again, the Member has it right. It’s...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. These were a number of programs that we have taken over from CMHC, so the names, I guess, reflect what they had. The kinds of projects that are in here for the Member, I guess, would be things like the North Slave housing, the Avens Court, the contribution we made to that originally. There are a number of community-based organizations that support has been provided for housing-type projects. Mr. Anderson may want to add to that in terms of more specific detail, but those are the kinds of projects that are in there.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I guess overall when we look at the capital plan that we have, we look at a variety of factors including the last needs survey, population change that’s going on, investments we’ve made in recent years, those sorts of things. That’s what we look at, as well as the condition ratings of our public housing stock to help define the overall investment in any given year. Then there’s also the program side, like home ownership repair programs. Because we do our intake for our major repair programs in the fall of the previous year, we have a pretty good sense of where the...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As the Premier pointed out, we do put out a call for applications at the start of each fiscal year. This last year, for example, we got many more requests for funds than we had available. One of the ways we prioritized was to organize them by region, first off, then by, as the Premier indicated, the type of support and by whether they were looking for ongoing funding or not, and then whether they’d gotten funding in the past. We used that as the general criteria to try to help set some priorities and try to get at those organizations that were most in need.