Robert C. McLeod

Again, that would be something that would be awfully difficult to do because if you got a territorial-wide volunteers list, I think a lot of people would have trouble putting their name on it because they do volunteer a lot in their community. Within the different regions across the Northwest Territories, they have volunteers that help out with all events that take place. Again, as I said before, everyone in the communities and regions know who the pool of volunteers is.

I must also point out – and I failed to mention it before – MACA just announced last year at the NWTAC AGM in Hay River, we...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Our volunteers are a very important part of communities as the Member pointed out. Through my role as Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs we have an opportunity to recognize a lot of the hard work that the volunteers are doing through the award program we have every year and this year we’ll be having it during the NWTAC again. Nominations come in, people nominate a lot of their local volunteers and then we honour them at the NWTAC’s annual general meeting. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, as far as prioritizing them, we have a point rating system to get into public housing. There are a number of things that are taken into consideration: crowding of their current housing, the housing condition that they are living in now, affordability of their current housing. There are also some other factors that are taken into consideration like the income, the length of time that they’ve been on the waiting list and whether they are a victim of family violence or have a disability or any kind of health condition. There are a number of factors that are taken into consideration...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The purpose of these transitional houses is to get people to transition, if they’re homeless or if they need a temporary place, to move into transitional housing, from there either try to get into the public housing or market housing or homeownership. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We would be willing to do that. Thank you.

The Crown land will convert to Commissioner’s land. The IAB lands will pretty well remain the same because I think that is an agreement with the Government of Canada to reserve land, so I don’t think those are going to change. I’ll confirm that and I’ll communicate that to the Member, but as far as I understand, that’s the only one that won’t change.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. As a Housing Corporation, we’d like to see as many people in their own homes as possible. If you look at the houses that we’ve been providing over the years, we have 2,400 public housing units. I think through the years we’ve managed to get about 1,500 homeownership units starting from way back to the present. So we’ve put a lot of people into their own homes and we’re still trying to tailor some of our programs so we can get more people into their own homes.

We have to be careful. We’ve had a number of clients that have turned their units back over to the NWT Housing...

The $680,000 is not to actually build brand new units. We will take existing units in the community and we will retrofit them so they’re suitable for hard-to-house clients. Part of that money will be earmarked for working with a local organization who might want to run this particular program in the community for us. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The Member is correct; we have a lot of individual cases that we do deal with. The numbers have come down substantially in the last little while which, again, is a good indication that the work that a lot of people want done on their units is being carried out.

As far as the changes to PATH, the Member is absolutely correct. We’ve had issues in the past where somebody would be a dollar over the Core Need Income Threshold and they were automatically declined. We’ve tried to tailor our programs that if they are a little bit over, now it’s not going to be that they are automatically declined. We...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. To my right I have Mr. David Stewart, president of the NWT Housing Corporation. To my left I have Mr. Jeff Anderson, vice-president of finance and infrastructure, NWT Housing Corporation.