Robert C. McLeod

Mr. Speaker, our maintenance staff in all of the small communities, they do condition ratings every year where they go from unit to unit and look at some of the work that needs to be done in there. They kind of use those condition ratings as a basis for some of the major improvement programs that we have through the Public Housing Program in our small communities. We do go through the units every year and identify all the potential maintenance issues, and then our staff in the small communities will then start generating work orders and remediate a lot of the issues that they find in the units...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This was an issue that we had a discussion with the NWT Teachers’ Association about, and we had committed to them that we were going to do some work and see what we could do to provide houses in some of the communities where they face the most challenges, one of the communities being actually in the Member’s riding.

We have approximately 102 units right now that we are renting out. I believe 41 of those are taken up by teachers. We’ve converted many of our vacant units into units that could be available to teachers, and we are planning, in the future, to work in each...

Mr. Speaker, we have a homelessness coordinator who was hired in August. She is actually planning on going to all regions in the Northwest Territories, compiling some data, a bit of a report, and then we’ll take that report and look at that as possibly a future way that we can allocate more funds into some of the communities again.

The pilot project I spoke of is a start. Once we hear back from our new homelessness coordinator, we look forward to working with the Members and seeing what we can provide to some of the communities that are most in need. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, we will be more than willing to sit down with the City of Yellowknife and discuss the jurisdiction of the lakebed.

Again, the Member is right; from the correspondence that I have been getting, it is a favoured spot of a lot of people that use the trail. There is some concern, and I have received e-mails directly, about the houseboat that is there. We are looking at trying to, again, locate the owner and have the houseboat removed from the area. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We have jurisdiction over that. It is Commissioner’s Lake that land is called. We have been trying to locate the owner of the houseboat so they can be served and have that houseboat removed. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, Yellowknife is a much larger community and a lot of people do come here and end up homeless. We recognize that. We work with some of the organizations in Yellowknife and provide some type of funding. Most of it is on the infrastructure side, but we make contributions. It’s starting to be recognized that out in the communities it is getting to be more and more of a problem. We have replacement public housing units we’re hoping to put into some of these communities. I think we’ve identified 14 for the Nahendeh this year, but that still is not going to address the homeless.

There are...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member had mentioned before on the core needs study that was done in 2009, and since 2009, as a government, I think we’ve spent over $151 million across the territory to try and address some of the issues contained in that report. There was $17.5 million in Nahendeh alone, plus an additional $5.7 million, I think, we’re debating this year and I’m glad for that.

As far as working on transitional housing goes, we are currently looking at a new initiative where we’ll identify some communities that could possibly have one of our housing units there converted into a bit...

I know there has been an attempt to serve the owner of the houseboat. I believe the sheriff has even gone out with a boat and tried to locate the particular individual. I can assure the Member that we are looking by the end of the week if we can’t serve these papers, then we might have to look at other options. My understanding is that once we do that, if there is a concern that boat is going to be there next spring, to make a bit of a commitment that once we get all the proper work done, then the boat should be removed. If it happens to be this winter, it will be this winter. Thank you, Mr...

Mr. Speaker, if it’s Commissioner’s land, I don’t foresee much change. Once devolution happens we’ll still be responsible for that land within the boundary. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you. We’d be more than willing to listen to all proposals that come in from the community. As I said before, we’ve made contributions in the past to some of the infrastructure side of it. The O and M, we haven’t made too many contributions to that. With the new initiatives, again, we’re looking at a partnership with a local organization and we will provide the infrastructure again, and we’ll work with them to see if there’s an agreement we can work out where they provide kind of the supervision of the place.

So as we roll out the details on that, I will be sharing it with committee...