Robert C. McLeod

I would like to welcome Sheila Nasogaluak, a constituent of Inuvik Twin Lakes, I believe. Welcome to the gallery. And to all the court workers up there, welcome

Mr. Speaker, I knew I should be prepared for that: When? We are continuing to do the work. For me to tell you an exact date, I don’t think I’d be telling you the truth. I will commit to the Members that I will get the information and I will communicate it to the Members. Again, I know I should always be prepared for the fourth question: When? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, the Member is correct; we are doing some work with our colleagues over at Health and Social Services and Transportation, trying to come up with overarching work to cover all of the Northwest Territories.

As far as MACA goes, we do provide $200,000 to communities that want to apply for some of these services. It’s $200,000 divided amongst the number of communities that apply. So we do have that, but understand that that doesn’t really cover a lot of the issues facing drivers on the highway. We are working with Health and Social Services. We are looking at some numbers. It is going...

Mr. Speaker, we have a number of units here in the capital and we are looking, in all the communities, at the number of units that we have there. This is kind of an ongoing issue to see where we can make some changes. Some communities may need to add on to the number that they have; some are a little over-allocated, as I said before. But it’s an ongoing issue and I could commit to the Member, and all Members opposite, that we will continue to have a look at this and make sure that we get to a point where all the housing needs are close to being met or are met, and also having this number of...

Mr. Speaker, the Yellowknife Housing Authority is currently over-allocated as far as the number of units that they do have. A lot of it affects the money that we get from CMHC. The money is declining; therefore, the number of units that we’re able to maintain is starting to be affected.

We’ve asked all the communities to look at ways of reducing their stock, because a lot of them are over-allocated on the number of units that they have.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to recognize Mr. Willard Hagen, a constituent of Inuvik Twin Lakes; and Mr. Richard Edjericon. I’d also like to recognize Mayor Andrew Cassidy and deputy mayor Brad Mapes of Hay River who I had an opportunity to meet with this morning. Welcome to the House, gentlemen.

Mr. Speaker, one of the things that we wanted to do with some of the money that wasn’t taken up by the communities is use it as a training component to train members in the communities. Volunteer firemen would be a good choice and anyone in the community that wants to be qualified as first responders. I think that’s the initial step that we have to take, because they can have a shiny piece of new equipment there, but if they’re not qualified as a first responder, it is a huge liability. I think a lot of communities recognize that. They were very open to the training component of it and we’re...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As a government, we don’t have services going out on to the highways. In many cases the accidents or incidents that happen are taken care of by the community nearest the incident. It’s just the way thinking is in the Northwest Territories. We’re all good neighbours and if something happens, somebody is going to respond and take care of that incident first and then worry about compensation later. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, each community is allocated a number of units that they keep in their stock. As we’re bringing new units into stock, a lot of the communities haven’t been reducing their allocation of units by that amount. So if a community got five new units, we would expect them to take five out of stock, because these are public housing replacement units. With the declining CMHC funding, it’s getting unsustainable to be trying to do maintenance on a lot of these units.

I recognize the Member’s point about the need for public housing. We do see that across the Northwest Territories. However, in...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member is correct; we were leasing 17 units from Inukshuk. They had a board of directors meeting and they had decided that they weren’t going to renew their lease with the NWT Housing Corporation, so that affected 17 units and all those residents in there. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.