Michael McLeod

Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the Member’s opinion. My personal opinion is create a better economy where we wouldn’t need as much social housing. Create a lot of jobs. Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, that’s the same question. I already indicated, yes, this time around we are going to focus on repairs as a priority. The Member has indicated a lot of concern there. We acknowledge that our housing stock is getting old. Over the last while, it’s been very difficult to do the required maintenance, so we have certainly a lot of deferred maintenance to tend to. I think the Member will be pleased, as we put our budgets together with this budget here and the federal budget, to see the investment in the different regions and different ridings including his.

It is something that we need to engage in. This is an issue that has been raised by many of the band councils across the Northwest Territories and we will commit to doing that.

Mr. Chairman, I should correct my statement. It’s $2,000 per senior for preventative maintenance. Sorry.

I appreciate the Member’s remarks.

Mr. Chairman, the Member asked about how many kilowatts on the average was used per household. It’s 600 to 700 kilowatts per household on the average and each individual or each client is required to pay six cents per kilowatt.

Thank you. The urban native fully targeted dollars that you see in the budget here was a federal program that was transferred to us. This program no longer exists except for these revenues that have an agreement in the North Slave. There is no other dollars in our budgets that reference any aboriginal or band funding per se.

Having said that, we do have universal partnership agreements with many bands. We are talking to at least one community in the Member’s riding about delivering some of these programs. We do have a number of asks from other band councils to see how we can work together to...

Mr. Chairman, I think we do most of what the Member is indicating. We do have some ability for the maintenance staff to get together at the regional level to share ideas, to talk about best practices. We also really are mounting, I’m hoping, a high profile campaign to educate the general public as to what we have in terms of programs. We do have programs under the CARE heading on preventative maintenance that people can tap into and they can hire private companies or private individuals or the band can help them deliver these programs for them. We’ve also embarked on getting apprentices on...

I believe it’s been three years now that this initiative to blend all the subsidy programs under one roof took place. We did hear the Members raise the issue. We have heard the concerns. We had recently met with ECE and we are working towards putting together an analysis or a review of how well it’s working. ECE has provided me with some information that I had not seen before, so I’m reviewing that and we will be getting together to decide how we will do a review. We are anticipating it would be an independent body that we would hire to do an analysis of it . Right now, that’s where we’re at.

W...

Mr. Chairman, it’s a flat rate; six cents no matter how many they use.