Mr. Chairman, the communities of Dettah and Ndilo have been probably some of the communities that have been most challenging in the area of getting land tenure. We have been working towards a third-party entity and we have had a number of meetings over the last while with the communities. It looked like it was resolved. I believe we have brought that to the federal government’s attention. We still have to formalize that but it doesn’t seem that that will be accepted, so we have to go back to looking at getting a formal federal lease on these lands. The land might be something very challenging...

Mr. Chairman, the community of Good Hope has already done some partnership arrangement with the NWT Housing Corporation. We were able to develop a number of properties in that community. There is, right now, a desire to start working towards a more formalized agreement in terms of a universal partnership agreement, or a UPA, and will continue to work with them towards that and explain to them and make sure everybody understands what the agreement states.

Mr. Chairman, the 90 percent collection rate was the percentage we have been able to collect historically in the year 2004-2005. In 2005-2006, the collection started slipping in the area of rent collection and it dropped down to 76 percent in the year 2006-07. We are now back up to 87 percent collection in the area of rents. Jeff can speak to the mortgages and the collections.

Mr. Chairman, with me I have Jeff Anderson, deputy minister or the acting president of the Housing Corporation; and Revi Lau-a, vice-president of finance and infrastructure services.

Yes, Mr. Chairman, first of all I should thank the Member for his office to help us try to come to some resolution on the issue. I should mention on the land issue we have put together a committee that involves MACA and CMHC and Indian Affairs, I believe, and ourselves to see how we can find our way through this. We are, of course, going to have to make a decision on the carry-overs at some point if we can’t resolve the land issue. Putting into retrofits is certainly an option. Any retrofits or whether it’s a modular unit we’re going to be putting together, that number that was asked about...

Yes, Mr. Chair. I am pleased to present the Northwest Territories Housing Corporation’s main estimates for the fiscal year 2009-2010, which requests a total GNWT contribution of $37.820 million.

This is a decrease of 28 percent from the 2008-2009 main estimates and is primarily due to the sunsetting of the Northern Housing Trust, which provided $50 million in federal housing investment over the past three years. Together with other revenues of $69.673 million the corporation will have approximately $107 million available to spend on housing in the Northwest Territories this fiscal year.

As...

Mr. Chairman, that is our goal. The numbers are very much correct and our target is to bring the core needs down. They are all relatively high. Based on 2004 information, we have to remember that and we should have our new core need figures for review or for public release in early summer of this year.

Our target, our goal, is to get all the core needs in the communities down to the national average, which I think is around 12 percent. We are still a long ways from that. We have, or will have, spent well over a million dollars in the last couple of years on housing and housing repair. We need...

We are trying to do something. We have a number of communities that are in the same situation. We are looking for options of how we can accommodate that. Our dollars come with rules. There are criteria. There are accountability issues. We have had requests from a number of band councils, aboriginal governments, to look at the concept of block funding. We are exploring that right now. We haven’t come to any type of conclusion whether that is doable or not.

We are checking, but I believe all our core needs, for the most part, our communities are at 30 percent except for Colville which is at 76 percent.

Mr. Chairman, it is a question, I guess, from the aboriginal government as to who owns the actual land. It would be relatively simply if everybody agreed that the federal lease would be in order, but in this case we are not getting that positive response from the band.