Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions today are addressed to the Minister responsible for the Northwest Territories Housing Corporation. I’m going to revisit a subject that I’ve spoken on a number of times, and that’s homelessness and what the Housing Corporation is doing about homelessness. In this fiscal year, I believe it is, we now have a homelessness coordinator, and I think the coordinator has been in the position for a while. I would ask the Minister to confirm how long.
My first question has to do with a question that I asked quite some time ago, and that was I expressed the need for standards for our shelters, that we do not have standards anywhere in the territory for any of our shelters.
I’d like to ask the Minister whether or not the homelessness coordinator is working on that or if the corporation in general is working on developing shelter standards.
Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. The Minister of Housing, Mr. McLeod.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The homelessness coordinator has been on board now for about a year and a half and has been visiting a lot of the agencies and gathering as much information as she can to assist her in her job. As far as the standards go, as the Housing Corporation, if we provide the infrastructure, we would ensure that infrastructure meets all the building standards. As far as the programming in there, I would have to have a discussion with my colleague, the Minister of Health and Social Services, because my understanding is that whoever the funding agency is to operate that shelter would have a set of standards that are built into the operating agreement. I will follow up with the Minister and see what type of standards that they have, but our part of it is usually just providing the infrastructure and having our own set of building standards.
Thanks to the Minister for that. It points out one of the problems that we have with homelessness and our government is that it crosses over departments, and I kind of thought with a homelessness coordinator that he/she would be responsible for all aspects of it, but perhaps not. So I appreciate the Minister looking into it for me.
The next point I wanted to bring up has to do with a resolution from the NWT Association of Communities 2014 annual general meeting. They passed a resolution there on homelessness and I want to read the operative clause: “Now therefore be it resolved that the GNWT fully fund homeless shelters within the boundaries of its communities and that the GNWT direct and fund its departments to end homelessness in the NWT.” So, you know, the resolution called for funding from the Housing Corporation.
I’d like to know first of all, how many homeless shelters do we have in the NWT, how many communities have a homeless shelter and what funding does the Housing Corporation provide to these shelters for their operations. Thank you.
As for the exact number of homeless shelters, I’m not quite sure. I will gather that information. I do know that through one of our programs, the NWT Housing Corporation, we were looking at four pilot projects in the communities where we would provide the infrastructure, do some necessary repairs to it, and work with a local agency, be it the band office or one of the local government offices, to operate this on our behalf.
I think we have three communities that have taken us up on that. We have one that’s in the works now. We’re looking forward to see how this rolls out, and this is to get people in the smaller communities that don’t have a place to stay, an opportunity to have somewhere to stay for a few days or…and supports that we have for housing, when we first got the portfolio, it was all rolled into this. There were different pots of money in different departments. We tried to bring all that money into the Homelessness Fund. We, I think, ended up with about $250,000, close to $300,000. This year we’ve added an additional $100,000 in the Shelter Enhancement Fund. So those that have homeless shelters, there’s an opportunity for them to put an application on this $100,000 to make some improvements on their facility. So that’s one of the many programs that we have in place. Thank you.
Thanks to the Minister. It’s good to hear that we are increasing funding, and I hope that continues, that we are going to continue to increase funding because it’s definitely an area where we have a definite lack. Emergency and transition housing is the other area where we really don’t have enough housing in any of our communities. Sometimes its non-existent or it’s very hard to come by.
The Minister kind of spoke to the fact that he’s trying to provide infrastructure in communities for emergency or homeless shelters. In those communities that have not taken up the Minister’s offer to date, what sort of a priority or what kind of actions is the Housing Corp taking to make sure that every community takes advantage of this offer? Thank you.
We had developed this as a pilot project with the hope that, well, with the four pilot projects, that the communities would put in the applications right away to take advantage of this. We were a little disappointed that we only had three come forward right away, and we do have, I think, a fourth one that we’re working on right now. We want to see how this works, and if this works well, this is a great opportunity for community organizations, too, because we will provide them with some funding to look after these homeless shelters on our behalf.
So, we’ll evaluate the results of this and then if there’s opportunity for us to expand this program into other communities, if they see how it’s working in these four particular communities, if there are opportunities there, we will certainly take advantage of those opportunities and see if we can expand the program. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Final, short supplementary, Ms. Bisaro.
Thanks, Mr. Speaker. Thanks to the Minister. Again, considering the interest expressed by the NWT Association of Communities, I would encourage the Minister and the Housing Corp very strongly to use NWTAC as a vehicle to get that information out and to get them to take advantage of the offer from the Housing Corp.
With the homeless coordinator in place now for a year and a half, in this 2014-15 budget year, can the Minister tell me what sorts of things the homelessness coordinator is working on? What are the priorities? What are the goals that this person is working on in this budget year? Thank you.
The coordinator is working with a number of different groups and hearing a lot of concerns out there, then they will package that information and come forward to the Housing Corporation.
We have two or three different pots of money. We have the Homelessness Assistance Fund. I think that pot is about $125,000. We have Small Community Homelessness Fund. We have $190,000 allocated for 14 projects in 10 communities to date, and the homeless coordinator plays a huge role in helping us with that. We have the Shelter Enhancement Fund that I spoke about.
So, the homeless coordinator is very important in helping us determine where some of these investments could be made, helping us look over the applications, and we have had fairly good success in the number of applications that have come in. We look forward to, again, working with the communities to try and help alleviate the problem with homelessness across the NWT. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Member for Mackenzie Delta, Mr. Blake.
