I have committed and I mentioned earlier that we are planning, in the coming construction season, going out with as many labour-only contracts as possible, especially in some of the smaller communities. When there’s a lot that needs to be developed, there are a lot of contractors within the communities themselves that are able to undertake this work.

One thing that I would be very wary of doing is breaking down the contracts too much. I mean, there’s always going to be a need for a general contractor and then he gets his subcontractors. In most cases, if he’s from a small community he’ll use...

Mr. Speaker, it is part of our plan to look at the overall delivery of housing across the Northwest Territories and see how we could improve our product, see how we can best support our LHOs with the declining funding. They are facing some challenges in their communities. Also with the rental arrears, that’s also another challenge that they are facing. It is something that looking at the overall picture and doing an overall review are issues that we have to look at. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This would fit into the overall Shelter Policy we’re developing right now and this would look at all aspects of delivery of housing across the Northwest Territories. The plan is to develop a policy in the next fiscal year. We see this as a bit of a way forward document to deal with a lot of the issues regarding housing in the Northwest Territories.

I was just commenting to the official that we put in multi-unit purchase. We should have actually made it a little easier by just putting duplex because that’s exactly what it was. I apologize for that and we’ll make sure that doesn’t happen again.

The fact of the matter is we’re looking for a duplex to purchase. We haven’t identified one yet. This is money that’s earmarked for the possible purchase of a duplex.

Anybody want to fill in for me, go ahead.

Mr. Speaker, as far as transferring the money back to the NWT Housing Corporation, Members will see that I think during this session as part of the supp process, as far as the reason it took so long, there were some details we had to work out with ECE. The actual block of money for the administration of the public housing rental subsidy is going back to the Housing Corporation and it will be done by the end of this Assembly.

Mr. Chair, we’re looking to dispose of some of the old units that we’ve written off, and as I mentioned to Member Abernethy, the last thing that we want to do is demolish them if there’s an opportunity for someone that might want one of these units. You know, at the end of the day, we’ve written them off because they’re beyond economical repair, so obviously it’s going to be an as-is, where-is, and Housing completely out of the picture. On the other hand, they’re going to need to be able to maintain the unit as far as looking after all the utilities and that goes.

We’re looking at different...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just in regards to the Members’ first concern with the old northern territorials, and he is correct, we try and take, as we put new public housing units into the system, some of the older ones out, because a lot of them are beyond economic repair. Those are the ones that we would take out first. The Weber units, I think are almost the next in line for that. We still find that the Weber units, a lot of them have gone through a retrofit probably within the last 10 years, so there is still some life left in those.

The northern territorials are basically all out of the...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I wish to table the following document entitled A Clear Path Forward, Municipal and Community Affairs Strategic Plan 2010-2015. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

During this winter we’re going to find a feasible solution for the removal of those assets and if we can work with somebody that can get rid of them at minimal cost to the GNWT. As far as an actual dollar figure, I’m not able to provide that right now. Once we have the discussion with the engineering firm, I think we’d be in a better position to have a bit of a dollar figure, but the bottom line is to try and remove these assets with minimal costs to the GNWT. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member is absolutely correct; there was some infrastructure that was removed from the site -- cherry picked, as she put it -- but during this past summer we’ve done an inventory of the site and we’re looking at hiring an engineering firm to assess the structural integrity in an attempt to place some value on that. We’re going to look at possibly if it’s feasible to have it go out again, or to see what steps we can take next to do the actual cleanup. Thank you.