Michael McLeod

Thank you. To demonstrate, I am willing to live with the will of this House. I was considering abstaining but…

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Mr. Chairman, I think the time has come that we have to introduce new technology, whether it is BlackBerries or laptops. I think we should try it out and really monitor how well it works. If it is something that we need to introduce for the long term, then we will do that. We need to make sure that we police it well. Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, most of the Members’ communities exceed 90 percent, some are close to 100 percent. We have one community that is having some challenges and we will be working with them.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We had anticipated that we would be part of the process for next year, so that is what we are working towards.

Mr. Chairman, I think as this is my second go-round as Housing Corporation Minister and I have raised it every year with the finance people of our government. The response is that we are legally obligated to recognize it in our books as a debt and we don’t have a lot of room to change that.

Mr. Chairman, I think this is my first time in front of committee as Housing Minister. I take his issues very seriously. We intend to deal with the repairs and also replacement of some units that are too old to be repaired. The difference is, Mr. Chairman, that we are intending to focus a good portion of our budget of new monies, once we get it sorted out, towards upgrade of our public housing stock. That includes repairs in his riding and replacing some of the units in his riding that cannot be repaired. I think it is going to be a breath of fresh air for all the communities across the...

Mr. Speaker, we did have a sit down meeting with the Gwich’in leadership and one of the chiefs did raise some concern with a staff position and comments made. We will look into the situation and we will take the advice of the Member and provide the guidelines to all our staff. Thank you.

Yes, Mr. Chairman. Our staff are already aware of this so they’ll be accommodating to that concept.

Yes, Mr. Chairman. Our target is $1.5 million. We don’t have it all rolled out yet for presentation and we haven’t got as far as calculating how many houses this will build. That is going to be difficult until we start identifying the areas that we are going in, which communities we are going to work with first and the costing is different in each community. So this, I expect, will be an annual program that will be there for the long term. We are certainly not going to meet all the demands and all of the need out there with this budget, but we need to start somewhere.

Mr. Chair, the Member raises a very good issue. It’s a real issue that we need to face right now. Our strategy has been to try to convince the federal government that they need to change their position. We’re working at the FPT table. We’ve joined forces with other jurisdictions and we’re hoping that we’re going to be successful on that front. Mr. Chairman, the reality is if we’re not successful, we’re really going to have to rethink how we do business in the social housing area. Will we be able to convert capital? I’m not sure that’s the solution. Raising rents? We are already hearing the...

Mr. Chairman, to the Member’s question, the answer is yes. The focus and the priority this time around, we are hoping, will be on upgrades to our public housing stock for energy purposes and also for suitability purposes.

Mr. Chairman, the Member also asked if we take that into consideration. We do condition rates on our units and that is factored into the rent and any time there are conditions that fall below 60 percent, we take a certain amount of money off for every percentage that it drops below that.