Robert C. McLeod

I am pleased to present the 2015-2016 Main Estimates for the Department of Municipal and Community Affairs. Overall, the department’s estimates propose an increase of $4.02 million, or 3.8 percent, over the 2014-2015 Main Estimates.

Highlights of the proposed estimates include:

funding of $48.3 million to provide for community government operation and maintenance costs and $17.6 million for water and sewer costs, a total increase of $2.27 million from 2014-2015;

forced growth funding of $2.939 million is comprised of $469,000 for Collective Agreement increases, $613,000 in community government...

Through the programs that we offer the communities. Like, we work directly with the communities. If the communities want to purchase that particular piece of equipment and work with a local organization to operate it for them, I think that is allowed under gas tax and through the CPI funding again. Thank you.

I believe that was one-time federal money that they accessed to purchase that equipment. But through the programs that we offer, the Gas Tax Agreement and the CPI funding, they are able to use those funds to purchase those pieces of equipment that they might need to get their residents around. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. That’s a good idea. We’ll work closely with the Department of Health, and all the information that we can gather, we’ll make sure that it’s available on our website. We will take the Member’s suggestion and we’ll work to implement it. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We appreciate that support.

As the work picks up, there will be opportunities where we will have to come forward to request more money to deal with all the work that we are doing. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to welcome my constituency assistant to the gallery, chaperoning a couple of Pages and I’ll recognize them later on in the week. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I think that’s a point that needs to be clarified. I did see it in the media that $900,000 was unused, which was in my response to Member Bisaro the other day.

We had $1 million originally budgeted for this program. We have reduced that to about $900,000. We were doing some math the other day and it comes to about $75,000 a month that we are trying to assist transitional rent supplement clients and that works out to $900,000 per year. Our uptake right now is not where we want it to be and we need to make people more aware that the program is out there. We have had some ads in the paper. We have...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We are just in the process of working with ECE to identify possible income support clients that we could transfer over to this program. We find that this program is going to be a good step going forward because, in the past, income support clients have had difficulty accessing private rentals. We feel with the NWT Housing Corporation having the lease, or sub-lease, then we would be able to make it a little easier for these clients to access housing. As soon as we come up with a progress report, or as we are moving along, we will be sure to update committee on the work...

We work with the communities and if there’s a desire from the communities to change their name to their more traditional language, which a lot of them are doing, this government would fully support the position of the community, and if that’s their wish then we will respect that. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It is a coordinated approach between Municipal and Community Affairs and Education, Culture and Employment. Thank you.