Robert C. McLeod

I’m not sure of the exact date, but we are almost at our two-year anniversary now and we will do an evaluation of the program to see if the program is working as it was intended to. Thank you.

That’s something I could commit to the Member that as part of the evaluation we can have a look at that. The program was originally designed to deal with affordability issues, and we’ve seen that in a lot of the market communities. I think their affordability issue was about 86 percent. So, as part of the evaluation, we could look to the issue the Member was raising. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The program was originally designed to help with subsidies for about 150 clients a year. Since the inception of the program, we’ve had 158 clients go through the program. We currently have 68 clients that are still in the program. Thank you.

The Member is correct that we did introduce a Revised Mortgage Balance Program near the end of 2012. We gave homeowners with mortgages with the NWT Housing Corporation a chance to get a fresh start with predictable, fair monthly rent. Total arrears in the mortgage portfolio have been reduced from $16.5 million to $9.1 million over the last couple of years. A majority of the clients have actually opted into the new program and collection rates have been in the 70 to 80 percent range for these clients. We have about 115 clients that have not entered the new program for one reason or another and...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The agreement was an extension to the Investment in Northern Housing Initiative that provided $1.8 million annually from the federal government, which is matched by the Northwest Territories Housing Corporation. So that gives us about $3.6 million in investment over the next five years.

We’ve used these funds in the past to help deal with some of the programs to help low and modest income homeownership repairs, and it doesn’t address the problem of declining federal funding to operate social housing.

We’re continuing to have discussions with our counterpart in Ottawa on...

Mr. Chair, if someone came forward and said they wanted to buy the unit, then we would sell it to them. We also have a program we have been offering the last number of years now called the… It’s got a long title, but we give them $50,000, $25,000… It just went down as I was speaking. We give them $25,000 a door and it’s a program that we’ve offered for a while. It’s more designed for those who want to rent to professionals in the community. We’ve had some good uptake in a number of communities. I can provide a list to the Member of communities that have taken us up on this offer. We saw that...

Mr. Speaker, first of all, the person who has been waiting for seven years, I would have to look into that. As I was saying the other day, there are many reasons people are on a waiting list, but one of the requirements of receiving support from income support is to be on the waiting list – they could be on the waiting list even with support from income support – but also paying off their arrears. I’ve seen a number of cases where they’ve been on the waiting list for a long time and taking care of their arrears and they were, in fact, allocated housing units once their arrears were paid off. I...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We’ve been waiting, as I said before, to sell those units and they can repair those units. I think that was the original ask when those units became available. I think even they saw that it was going to be quite costly to renovate those units. Again, I committed to providing the actual numbers to the Members. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member is right; we do have a Homelessness Strategy. One of the parts of the strategy is the Northern Pathways to Housing, and it’s a pilot project that we’ve been trying to implement in the communities. I think we have four communities that were identified. We have two communities, Aklavik and Behchoko, that actually have their proposal put together, and we have Fort Simpson and Fort Good Hope that we’re continuing to engage with, hoping they take us up on our offer.

It’s up to $100,000 to renovate an existing unit and there is ongoing funding of $70,000 over five...

Mr. Chair, the unit needs a considerable amount of work and there has been interest in parties wanting to purchase that unit, so we’re exploring that right now. Thank you.