Robert C. McLeod

If the Member is referring to a wait-list to get into public housing, I would have to get the information and relay it on to the Member. Obviously, a lot of our communities across the Northwest Territories have some waiting lists, but I will gather the specific information and relay it on to the Member for Hay River North. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, I have no further answers. I am also concerned with this situation. Thank you.

---Laughter

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We recognize that we do have a lot of seniors across the Northwest Territories that try to be very independent and live in their homes. Through Housing we try to support them as much as we can. We have repair programs for seniors. Within the other departments they have some programs within their departments that are geared towards assisting seniors, because seniors like to be independent by nature and the fact that a lot of them want to live in their own places, but living on fixed incomes, with a lot of them, it is a bit of a struggle, so as the government we recognize...

We can have discussion with our representative on the International Games Committee and see if there might be a way that something could be worked out, because a lot of kids look forward to the opportunity to compete in the Arctic Winter Games, compete in the sport of their choice, and having to respect the next host, which is actually Greenland and their lack of a lot of ice facilities, I think some kind of alternate arrangements might have to be worked out. We’ll have to have those discussions to see where we go from here, because it is going to be a concern for a lot of people in the next...

First of all, this is not an excuse that we’ve used. We don’t make excuses. The Member has said, as well as I have, that we have great faith in our communities’ ability to build quality products and put them on the ground. However, it is felt that there is some need for this particular service and I’ve committed to the Member that I will follow up on this and see where we can take it from here and put all the proper research together and see if it’s something that we can carry on further here in the Northwest Territories.

I will follow up, and obviously, as with all the departments in the government, they’re over there monitoring the conversations we have in here, so I’m sure that they’re putting some information together for me right now. I will follow up and see where that went. It’s a very novel idea and it has some merit, but we’d have to follow up on it further.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to recognize a former resident of Aklavik and Inuvik, a good friend of mine, Mr. Frank Edwards Jr., better known as Somoe. Welcome, Somoe.

Thank you. There is always a danger that there are going to be some people that try to take advantage of some of the programs we have to offer. We have to do our part to ensure that this is distributed fairly and to those that are most in need. I think in such small jurisdictions in the Northwest Territories, working with the communities we all know the people in the communities that are in most need, those that are trying to get a good start in life. We feel that this is going to give them that good start, and like I said before, they can either graduate into regular market housing or they...

Thank you. This is very early in the process, so we’re not sure what kind of uptake we’re going to have on this. We’re looking at possibly 175 across the Northwest Territories initially, graduating them into quarterly sections. So there will be a continuous intake instead of doing all of them the first quarter and then having nothing left over for the rest of the year. So the initial plan is to try and assist at least 175 by quarterly installments. Thank you.

Thank you. We did provide a letter of support to CRTC to support the application that was going in there. We felt that we should do that because we wanted to look at our capabilities here in the Northwest Territories. So we’ve done that and that was done right away so the application could go in and we need to do our due diligence and not just sign on because everybody else has done it. We wanted to make sure we’re ready. We feel that now we’re in a fairly good position in taking advantage of the technology we do have with the hope that technology across the Northwest Territories will improve...