Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I’m concerned about the increasing number of evictions from public housing and I’m equally concerned about the fact that the Ministers who are responsible for Housing, Education and Health and Social Services do not appear to be working together to reduce the number of evictions.
Last year, a report on homeless women and families in the NWT said that the number of homeless women is in the hundreds. Where do these Ministers think that these evicted families are to go? Who is to support them? What are their options in finding housing in their community or elsewhere?
Clearly, we seem to have a growing class of people who require housing, Mr. Speaker. We all know that the GNWT is facing increased demands to provide shelter and shelter funding.
Mr. Speaker, for example, if someone was to be evicted in Yellowknife and they wanted emergency shelter through the YWCA, they could be waiting six, nine, or even 12 months to get through that waiting list for emergency shelter. So what do they do?
What happens when a family, a northern family, is evicted from public housing? Is Health and Social Services supposed to step in and provide housing now? What should we do? Because the problem becomes continuously obvious that the Ministers are not preventing evictions. Why can’t the local housing authority, the local health authority, and certainly the clients work together ahead of time to prevent evictions? Especially ones that are related to arrears.
The solution is this simple: If we had a staff person working on intervention rather than eviction, this would go a long way to solve this problem, and I suspect that the cost for these authorities would be a lot cheaper than putting someone in an apartment or a hotel for the night because they’ve been evicted to the street. The cheaper solution and the long-term solution is to get them on their feet through the local housing organization.
Having an eviction hanging over your head cannot be a healthy environment for that family. So how many evictions are coming up? Well, I’ve heard unconfirmed reports that potentially 50 families are facing eviction outside of Yellowknife. Then should Yellowknife be getting ready for the wave of people coming this summer?
What is the GNWT doing? Well, I can tell you what the GNWT isn’t doing and I certainly hope that these Ministers will see this problem, organize, and start having someone working with these clients in advance of this problem, because when an MLA gets a phone call at 2:00 p.m. on Friday at the end of the month, there’s not much we can do about a Supreme Court order that orders an eviction.
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. The honourable Member for Nunakput, Mr. Jacobson.
