Debates of October 20, 2006 (day 12)

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, today I would like to speak about the government’s decision to transfer rent payments from the housing authority to ECE. Before I came down here, I made some rounds in Inuvik and talked to a lot of people there because I have been hearing some concerns about how this program is not working. I hear from tenants who have never been in arrears in their life being in arrears now because it’s taken too long. They bring their assessments and their pay stubs over to ECE and they do their assessment and say we’ll mail it to you.

When the local housing authorities used to do it, they would go in there once a month with their pay stubs and have their rent assessed and they would be able to pay their rent on the spot. This saved a lot of people from going into arrears. It was good for the LHOs. They got their money on a quarterly basis and they were able to look after all their bills. Now you have LHOs having to wait for their money from ECE, which has taken awhile to get there. Some well run LHOs are potentially running deficits because of this whole program. It’s become a real concern up in the communities.

They used to assess your rent two months prior and that didn’t work for tenants either. A lot of tenants, as we well know, are back pocket bankers. In two months, they won’t have the rent money. So this is a system that worked and, for some reason, they decided to streamline the system and they streamlined it real good, so it doesn’t seem to be working anymore. I know they say there are bugs that have to be ironed out…

Bugs!

…but, Mr. Speaker, let’s just squash the bugs and go back to something that was working before. If you have something that works, stay with it and it benefits everybody. It benefits the tenants that have never run arrears in their life. They are going to do their payments and they are told you have credit, come back in a month. Mr. Speaker, we have a system that works and works fine and works for the people, then the government should stick with it instead of just transferring money back and forth. I will have questions for the Minister of ECE at the appropriate time. Thank you.

---Applause