Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The federal government will be getting out of public housing in 2038. That’s 25 years from now. I should be about 35 years old by then. The federal government will not continue to allocate funding for social housing in the Northwest Territories or in Canada.
We are experiencing cutbacks from social housing right now as we speak. Every year we’re receiving less and less. Soon the money will run dry, and then what? Are we ready for this? That’s a good question.
Today we own about 2,400 public housing units in the Northwest Territories. Each unit costs the NWT Housing Corporation about $16,000 per year. That includes electricity, heat, and water and sewer delivery. The sad part is that we have some houses sitting empty in our communities.
People keep reminding me of the promises that were made by the government of the day a long time ago, about how they were going to own their own homes once they were relocated off the land and put into public housing units at that time. Since we pay more for keeping our residents in those units, they are still not close to owning their own homes. They are residents who live in those units until they pass on. The government has to do away with that kind of thinking and work with people in training, creating jobs and assisting our residents with home ownership, and make it a priority of this government to provide support to our residents to become homeowners.
We value and take pride in our diverse cultures and our ability to adapt, and I believe we could adapt to new ways of looking at housing. We need to have discussions with our people, pay attention to them, and to adjust our strategic planning to see the future of our residents. We need a comprehensive territorial or national housing strategy.
We’re all in this together. There’s no telling what will happen if we work together with our residents and come up with solutions for our housing strategic plan. With the right amount of funding, it might just work. We need it to work. We need it to work now.
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. The honourable Member for Range Lake, Mr. Dolynny.
