Robert C. McLeod

Thank you. That is one of the options that we looked at, one of the options that was discussed at the Ministers’ forum that I held recently attended by the Housing Corporation employees from across the NWT along with a couple of MLAs and there were a lot of ideas floating around. That was one of them. There is a liability issue, but it would be something I think that would have to be initiated by the LHOs and if everything falls in place as far as insurance and liability go, I think it’s something that they’d be willing to explore. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member is correct; there have been some eviction notices that were given out in Deline. Some of these tenants have gone through the rental officer. There were some conditions that were laid out. Most of these tenants did not meet the conditions of those. They didn’t meet the conditions so the eviction process was underway. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, we are in discussions with ECE on that particular part of it. Those discussions are all ongoing. We are hoping to come up with a resolution quite soon. We didn’t want that to delay our implementation of the June 1st start-up date so we are continuing with that and we continue to have discussions with ECE on the rest of it. Thank you.

My understanding is the applications are complete. We have had a few requests from negotiated contracts and that is something that we’re reviewing at the moment. The negotiated contract, we have used quite a few of them over the past few years in some of the communities and negotiated contracts are there to help communities build up capacity, contracted book capacity so they can compete in an open market, understanding that we still have an MOU that we try to follow as closely as possible. So to answer the Member’s question, and I’m just going on here, but we have received the applications...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I can assure the Member and all Members of this House that the implementation date is June 1st. We are on target to meet that. All LHOs have received the training that they need to implement the PHRS, so it is on track for June 1st. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This is a concern that we heard and a particular example was a material contract for supplying material. There was some belief from some of the district suppliers that they were unfairly treated because they were looking for a territorial-wide issue. That has been resolved. A lot of local material supply tenders are going out. As far as the Member is concerned, there was a time when there were a lot of labour-only tenders that were let and it benefitted the small communities. Some of them have built up their capacity and are able to compete on the supply, ship and erect...

Mr. Speaker, we are hoping to develop an updated NWT Volunteer Support Initiative and use this as an opportunity to listen to the organizations out there and see what is the best way that we can support our volunteer sector. We do provide some support right now to some of the volunteer groups, but we are hoping to enhance or expand on this program through questions there. We are looking at this as an opportunity as we did with the Volunteer Summit using that as an opportunity to listen to those that are most affected by this. We took some of that information and took the next step. We are...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member is correct; we were out consulting on a new initiative. I can assure the Member that the new Volunteer Support Initiative will be completed by this fall. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, I will follow up with the department immediately and I’ll look to have some kind of response back to the Member and Members by the end of session. Thank you.

The LHOs basically operate or are run by a board. We do have some involvement in the financing that we provide to them. The Minister doesn’t normally give direction or orders to the LHOs. We can raise concerns with them, but we’ll continue to try and do what we can as a corporation to help tenants across the Northwest Territories deal with the arrears issue.

We’re $10 million in public housing arrears right now and with the money from the federal government declining, it’s important more than ever to start collecting on some of these arrears. It is something that’s on our radar and something...