Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I’d like to speak about housing in Fort Liard today. When I am talking with my constituents in Fort Liard, I hear that there are few available public housing units. With few homes to rent, there tends to be overcrowding. This has been an ongoing issue.
The community housing needs study completed in 2004 identified that 29 houses, or 16 percent, were overcrowded or did not have enough bedrooms appropriate for the number of people. I don’t think that these statistics have improved very much. Residents of Fort Liard require adequate and affordable housing. Adequate housing is necessary for health, especially in this time of H1N1 concerns, as viruses spread when there is overcrowding.
Adequate housing also contributes to children’s general health and the ability to learn, develop socially at school and in their community. At the same time as this scarcity of public housing, there are homes available for ownership and more homeownership units planned for construction next year.
The community needs rental housing but is being provided with homeownership units. What is wrong with this picture? Fort Liard is not the only community where this imbalance is occurring. This imbalance is created, by and large, by overdue accounts or arrears to people from accessing previous NWT Housing Corporation programs. Some of these are even decades old, Mr. Speaker. So my assessment is that these homes will be difficult to fill as we have many people in arrears. We need a strategy to address this.
Currently it does seem wrong that houses would stand vacant and become subject to possible vandalism when individuals and families need housing. When there are available homeownership units and no available rental units, can we rent out the homeownership units? There must be some way that we, the NWT Housing Corporation, could offer these homes for rent as this is the biggest need right now in Fort Liard. I urge the Minister of the NWT Housing Corporation to work with the hamlet, the ADK Dene Band, to make sure that available housing is utilized in Fort Liard. Mahsi cho.
Thank you, Mr. Menicoche. The honourable Member for Weledeh, Mr. Bromley.
