Rylund Johnson

Yeah, thank you, Mr. Chair. You know, admittedly I have to delve into that report. And I know we always throw around these numbers of billions of dollars to get our stock up to where it should be. I'm just curious, you know, we have a budget here with a $30 million increase and that's good. But do we have kind of a monetary figure of you know, in an asset management plan if you the last question was how are we going to pay for this or what is it going to cost. I'm just the bare maintenance, according to replacing that 1,300 unit number, how much money or additional money we need? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. My questions are for the next section.

Yes, thank you, Madam Speaker. You know, it's back to that chicken and egg problem. No one is going to tell you it's a rightsbased cabin if it means they all of a sudden have to start paying taxes and lease fees and they're presently not doing that. And we can't exempt them from taxes and lease fees unless we identify a definition of whether it's a rightsbased cabin. So this is why this issue has not been solved. I think at the very least, there are a number of obviously rightsbased cabins where they were told to get a lease, they perhaps did not understand what that meant, they perhaps got...

Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair. I'd like to speak a bit about debt for the housing corporation. I've expressed this before that, you know, the power corp has a similar revenue to the housing corp, and it is hundreds of millions of dollars of debt and the housing corp, with about the same revenue as and sorry, I don't have the figure. But you guys got about $10 million or so, and you don't have a debt problem, that's for sure. And I'm just to me, it seems that we're spending, you know, $30 million on housing this is one of the biggest investments we've made in this Assembly that to pay...

Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that, that seems like good money. Can I just get a bit of a sense of whether there are any plans to centralize the way we do maintenance? When I speak to the LHOs, you know, sometimes there's push back about what they're responsible for, what we're responsible for, what exactly gets in the schedule. It seems to me that the housing corp should probably have a piece of software that has every single unit in it and every single thing that's been done and all of that's inputted. You know, I know that we are really decentralized in this area. But is there any plans to...

Thank you. Can I get an updated figure of the total amount of money we owe CMHC? Thank you.

Yeah, thank you, Mr. Speaker. In fact, we don't use income testing for anything in public healthcare. And if you show up to the doctor, it doesn't matter how much money you make; you get services provided if you are sick. And that is exactly what we were trying to do with people who had these specified disease conditions. And my concern, Mr. Speaker, is we're now asking people to go out and try and find third-party insurance when they have diseases which makes it very difficult to get third-party insurance. We're asking people to put their coverage at risk, and it is causing them a lot of...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I think it was quite clear in that public engagement that lots of people were very concerned about the proposal to remove the specified conditions. Can the Minister confirm whether the plan is to draft that new policy that will, in fact, remove those specified conditions? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Last fall, the Department of Health and Social Services went out to consult on their extended health benefits policy. And on first glance, it seemed that the plan was to expand coverage and means test it, something I had no opposition to. But upon a closer reading, it was clear that that plan was to do that at the expense of the specified disease conditions in the schedule to that policy, Mr. Speaker; something I do oppose.

And, Mr. Speaker, so the department tabled their “what we heard” report and in that report, it was pretty clear that there was support for expanding...

Yeah, and, you know, I think there's a different argument to be made, whether you want to, well, get a mortgage for a house in nonmarket community but, to me, if we're going to build a new building in Yellowknife, you know, where it's clear that that asset is mortgageable, it has a value, that would make sense. I guess I'll just leave that as a comment that perhaps, you know, at the housing corp, going forward when it tries to get money out of Cabinet, it might not get money but perhaps it could just ask for debt because that would work too. Thank you.