Robert C. McLeod

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

Not in this present budget. There’s none of the small units the Member is talking about for seniors.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I will commit to the Member and all Members that we will provide them with a briefing as to some of the steps that we’re taking.

The president said that I am the chair of the P/T Ministers of Housing. We had a quick meeting in the spring and there was a concern from all the Ministers from across the country on the declining CMHC funding. What happened is we are losing. Last year I think we lost close to $1 million. They weren’t feeling it as much down south as we were up here because it’s a big portion of ours, but they’re starting to feel it now, so you’re getting the...

We’ll look at all the communities that don’t have an option there right now. If there is a need in Fort Simpson, obviously, in our opinion, they would be an eligible community. Again, the major piece of this is finding a good community partner to work with. But to answer the Member’s question, Fort Simpson would be eligible. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. The Member’s first point there on the hot water tanks, I think we’ve got about 1,234 units in the thermal communities and about 90 of them are still on electric hot water, so we’re looking at opportunities to convert the rest of those. That’s 7.3 percent of the ones in the thermal communities. In the hydro communities we have 22 percent of our units that are still on electric. For the number of units we have, I think the fact that we have quite a number of them on oil fired and, again, always looking forward for opportunities to improve that.

The Member spoke on the K...

Thank you, Madam Chair. We’ve worked closely with the communities, and communities have provided us with their five-year capital plan, because they realize how much they’re getting over the next number of years so they do a good job in prioritizing their investments over the next five years. I was looking at them, actually earlier this morning, and they’ve done a great job in some of their priorities and even recognizing the fact that with development coming and that, you know, we’ve got to be ready for it. Again, it’s a decision that the community government makes.

We have assistant...

Thank you, Madam Chair. The Member raised a lot of interesting points. Again, we appreciate the support of the Member. The $835,000 he spoke of was an internal allocation to try and address some of the housing issues for professionals in the community. However, we’re looking forward to bringing forward initiatives to this Assembly, with the support of this Assembly, and we’re looking forward to bringing some initiatives forward that would help try and address some of the issues in a lot of the small communities that have challenges with housing for staff. So we’re looking at updating committee...

Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate the opportunity to respond. We appreciate the Member’s comments and he’s absolutely right; the communities have taken this responsibility. There have been some challenges, but for the most part they’ve done a fantastic job at determining their projects and their priorities, and you’re absolutely right when you say gone are the days when you tried to get your project into the capital system. So it’s been working and we’re quite pleased with how the communities have responded to the challenges of administering this themselves. They’ve done a great job. In...

I’m sorry. I apologize. I was so concentrating on the first point the Member made, I forgot about the second.

We are monitoring the one unit that we have up in Inuvik. We are able to monitor the use there as far as utilities go. I am committing to providing data to all the Members on some of the savings that we are seeing because of using a few more energy-efficient systems plus the work that we have done on the units themselves.

Right now it is fairly early in the game. We do have a new system where we are able to monitor the utility costs for pretty well every unit in the NWT Housing...

Thank you, Madam Chair. The Member is correct; the infrastructure budget itself hasn’t changed from the $28 million in 2000, but what we’ve done is we’ve heard from the communities and they are challenged, they are getting more and more buildings and they’re challenged with the O and M side of it. But we have made it a little more flexible with the capital budget where they’re able to use 10 percent towards their O and M.

As far as increasing the infrastructure budget, their biggest concern right now was the O and M side of it. We’re working with Canada to try to find out what our share of the...