Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to reflect today on the problematic way that our government funds and works with nonprofit organizations who are providing essential social services. Yesterday in Committee of the Whole, I raised the urgent situation of the Spruce Bough supportive living housing facility where the nonprofit Yellowknife Women Society is housing and providing wraparound services for 26 people with complex medical needs and addictions issues.
Ever since this facility opened its doors in 2020 with capital funding support from the feds, it's been cobbling together shortterm operational funding, mostly from the GNWT. Now, a lot of our basic social safety net is operated by nonprofits. They put roofs over the heads of seniors or the underhoused population or women and children fleeing violence. They provide daycare to children so their parents can go to work or school and put roofs over the heads of their families. These are services that we can't allow to fail. And if they do, the government is under considerable pressure to step in and take over these services to stop people from dying or to stop the economy from grinding to a halt. And we've seen the GNWT have to step in and the extra cost of that.
In recent years, the GNWT has taken over the day shelters and sobering centres in both Inuvik and Yellowknife, and we see in our supplementary estimates that that facility in Yellowknife alone costs us an extra $2 million a year on top of what it used to cost to have a nonprofit running. The reason, of course, that NGOs provide these services more cheaply is that they rely heavily on volunteer and low paid labour. We rely on goodwill, but that is a fragile currency that can easily dissolve.
And yet we seem to treat these essential social services as if they were any other contract. Pretend that we are the one in control, that we can drive costs and set the terms, and that any NGO would be lucky to be chosen as the winning bidder. But in many cases, we need those few nonprofits as much or more than they need our funding.
The GNWT has done reports on how to better support NGOs in general but there are differences between the government throwing chunks of funding here and there to host fun community events and throwing shortterm
Member from Yellowknife North, your time is up.
Unanimous consent granted
I was saying there's a difference between throwing chunks of funding haphazardly for community events and throwing shortterm chunks of funding haphazardly to keep roofs over peoples' heads. And so I don't want to stand here and plead with the government to have a heart and please donate money to these heroic organizations because that's part of what got us into this mess thinking that we can just offer charity when we have extra money in our pockets. I'm asking this government to think practically about what services our residents expect and how we can make longer term plans to collaborate with NGO partners with stable (audio).
Thank you, Member from Yellowknife North. Members' statements. Member from Yellowknife Centre.
