Thank you, Mr. Speaker. To my surprise when I opened up page 3 of the Yellowknifer today, I saw and I counted 194 families still in need of some type of shelter.
What it is, is a cry to this government for more housing, more emergency shelters, more transitional space. These shouldn’t be numbers that anyone should be proud of. This government itself should be hanging its head in shame.
Last year the government built just over one house per 33 communities. The actual stat was 1.15, when you do the math. This government has allowed 19 percent of the NWT houses to still have core need. The poverty list isn’t getting any shorter. It continues to go unaddressed, and while housing solutions are being ignored by the lackluster investment, we only have no further to look to either the McLeod government or to the Minister R.C. McLeod and start to wonder where they are fighting at the Cabinet table for more money in housing.
There has never been a session that has gone by that I have not heard “we need more housing.” There is not a week that doesn’t go by when I hear from somebody in our community that needs more housing in Yellowknife, and I know that cry is equal, if not worse, in the smaller communities. People need housing solutions.
I never hear about how people are fighting at the Cabinet table about let’s find more money for housing. I just hear about nothing else at all. As a matter of fact, the fact is that they’re all worried about their own little projects. I wish somebody would take housing on as their individual project and become the champion of it.
So, what we see and what we hear is the defence of the status quo. We hear how CMHC, oh boo hoo, no more money. Well, the fact is I’m sick and tired of hearing that. Why don’t we find new solutions? If we keep blaming CMHC, eventually we’re not going to have anyone to blame but ourselves. Well, I certainly hope that we get to that solution a lot faster.
Better yet, if we wanted to do something, this government could show some real brass leadership by leaning forward and saying, “We’re going to build 20 new homes in every community. Now, we don’t need the money immediately, but we could come up with a plan.” Plans such as it would create a jobs boom; we could re-orientate some of our income support money; we could re-orientate some of our housing money; and there are a lot of other types of ways. We could challenge the private sector to say, “We need 20 new units in that community. How can you step up to the challenge?” Money wouldn’t be needed immediately, but it would be over a trend of a couple years as we did payments.
As my time runs out, I certainly hope the enthusiasm of this government doesn’t run out on this problem. Thank you.
