Robert C. McLeod

Mr. Speaker, the NWT Housing Corporation will do our part in trying to get people into units. At the same time, the clients themselves have to remove some of their own obstacles. In many cases all we ask is that they enter into some kind of an agreement with the LHO, and not only enter into it just to get back on the waiting list, but we would like them to honour it. We’ve seen situations in the past in a number of our communities, where a lot of clients that have been evicted have entered into a repayment plan or some kind of option with the LHO and they have honoured it. We’ve seen some...

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to provide an update on plans for supported housing for seniors. One of the priorities of the NWT Housing Corporation’s strategic plan, Building for the Future, was to develop infrastructure based on community needs including approaches to support housing for seniors and aging in place.

Seniors are the fastest growing segment of the territorial population. Currently, there are about 600 seniors that reside in public housing and the NWT Housing Corporation has units targeted for the senior population in many communities. Providing the opportunity for seniors to live...

We would have to look at that. Ultimately, our goal in the Northwest Territories Housing Corporation is to try and see as many homeowners as possible. We have to recognize, also, that there is always going to be a need for public housing and public housing clients. It’s a bit of a balancing act and we have to weigh those out. Ultimately, we’d like to get people into home ownership. Some of the changes that we want to make now will probably have long-term effects and we’ll have to wait until 2038, if things don’t change by then, to see where the Northwest Territories is at as far as providing...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. First of all I want to correct the Member. The Member will be 79 years old in 2038, because I’ll be 78. We continue to raise this issue with our counterparts in Ottawa. We try to get them to see the fact that it is affecting how we administer public housing. I think, between now and then, if they don’t move on this, a lot of decisions may have to be made within the Housing Corporation and the government as to what exactly we want to be. Do we want to be just a social housing provider, or continue with all the programs that we offer now?

We have made some changes to our Home Ownership Program. We’re actually just in the process of putting a Minister’s statement together in which we will make the announcement within the next week or so. But the Member is correct, though; there has been a great concern across the Northwest Territories about the number of vacant units. I believe that at one particular time we had 130 vacant units, and that was because we were taking advantage of the federal infrastructure money and getting these units on the ground, and we were left with a situation where we have allotted many more units than...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to recognize my wife of 34 years and the most patient woman in the world. Judy, welcome to the gallery.

As I mentioned before, we do have the Building for the Future, a strategic framework for housing that we just recently completed. In there it talks about a lot of the ways that we want to deal with the declining CMHC funding. Also, the Member talked about communities. We’ve had communities in the past that have taken on the responsibility of administering their own public housing and realized that it was a lot more than they had bargained for, so they had turned the administration back over to the NWT Housing Corporation. We’re always open to partnerships. I think we’ve proven that in the past...

We do have our Building for the Future, the Northwest Territories strategy for housing looking into the future. There probably is a lot of work that’s going on nationally. A lot of the communities and jurisdictions down south, I think, are going to feel the effect a lot more than we are because their public housing and social housing portfolios are much larger than ours. It is a great concern across this country, not only for us but it affects us quite a bit because we have a majority of our houses, especially in the small communities, that are public housing partly funded by the money that we...

Mr. Speaker, I’ll have the information to the Member by the end of day Monday. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As far as the ones in Detah and Ndilo go, I’m not quite sure how many have actually been sold yet and then the ones that are vacant out there, so I will undertake to get that information for the Member. I know I did commit to getting the information for the Member. There’s still a little work to do, but I will get that information not only for Detah and Ndilo but for the units across the Northwest Territories.