Robert C. McLeod

The boards usually set the securities that are required, the amount. We negotiate with the proponent as to the instrument that we are going to use. A surety bond is an insurance bond that’s carried by major multinational insurance companies, which is an acceptable form under the Waters Act. I can update or I can give committee a bit of a briefing on the direction that we’re going so they can have some assurance that we are protecting, as we said we’re going to, the opportunities for cleanup and so we need to make sure that we’re protected, and I stand by that.

The coordinator is working with a number of different groups and hearing a lot of concerns out there, then they will package that information and come forward to the Housing Corporation.

We have two or three different pots of money. We have the Homelessness Assistance Fund. I think that pot is about $125,000. We have Small Community Homelessness Fund. We have $190,000 allocated for 14 projects in 10 communities to date, and the homeless coordinator plays a huge role in helping us with that. We have the Shelter Enhancement Fund that I spoke about.

So, the homeless coordinator is very important...

As for the exact number of homeless shelters, I’m not quite sure. I will gather that information. I do know that through one of our programs, the NWT Housing Corporation, we were looking at four pilot projects in the communities where we would provide the infrastructure, do some necessary repairs to it, and work with a local agency, be it the band office or one of the local government offices, to operate this on our behalf.

I think we have three communities that have taken us up on that. We have one that’s in the works now. We’re looking forward to see how this rolls out, and this is to get...

Thank you. That’s something that we would rely on the Aboriginal Sport Circle to help us with. I do know that they have the Middle School Traditional Games Championships here in the capital and I’ve had the opportunity to attend a couple of them. They were well attended and the enthusiasm there was fantastic and the Aboriginal Sport Circle did a fantastic job putting those on. There are opportunities for some of the regional sporting organizations to have maybe a regional one, then they would work with the Aboriginal Sport Circle and our supporting partners to try to help bring that about...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We were pleased with the results that we had in Regina and I think that’s a good indication of investment that this Legislative Assembly has made to giving our youth in all the communities an opportunity to be active. I think we’re seeing a direct result of that now. I have not received a final report yet. I’m looking forward to that to see if there’s any recommendations on how we can improve our gold medal haul for the next one. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, with our move toward more multi-unit type configurations, they have a lot of single units that we are not too interested in; however, we would support eligible clients if they were to want to purchase one of those units using one of our homeownership programs, the PATH program for example. If they qualified and the unit was up to standards, then we would support them in their pursuit of trying to buy some of these former federal units. But we will continue to have those discussions and see if there are ways for opportunities for us to inherit those or get those into our inventory...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The initial discussions on devolution, the transfer of the federal houses over to the GNWT was not included in those initial discussions. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I wish to table the following document, entitled “2014 NWT Community Survey – Summary of Housing Results.” Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, being one of the Members from the Beau-Del, we’re very fortunate that we get to rely on the advice and experience of a lot of good leaders up there, and one of those is Mr. Floyd Roland, who was very instrumental with his advice and experience when I first started this. It’s been almost 10 years already; it’s 10 years this month. So I thank him for that and welcome him to the gallery once more. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I think we will get somewhere under this leadership this Assembly. I think we’ve proven that we’ve gotten somewhere. If the Member would have attended some of the Social Programs briefings, he would have been up to date on some of the initiatives that we’re taking and will continue to take them.

It is a struggle to work with Canada on the funding, but we’re not using that as an excuse, we’re trying to meet that head on. We’ve updated Social Programs on some of the initiatives that we’re taking to deal with the declining funding to go to a multi-unit type configuration. We find that would be...