Robert Hawkins

For clarification, I was referring to the Housing Needs Survey.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My oral questions will be directed to the Minister of the Housing Corporation, which I’m sure he’s completely surprised. I will be following up on my Member’s statement as I talked about the affordability issue and adequacy issue in my Member’s statement.

Can the Minister explain what actions are being taken about the affordability challenge in Yellowknife?

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I also want to talk about housing in Yellowknife.

According to the 2009 Housing Needs Survey, there are 6,742 households in Yellowknife. While the city is often overlooked in discussions about housing in the NWT, I note that this is where most of the households are located in the North.

It is true Yellowknife housing is different from the housing issues in other NWT communities. The survey identified that 14 percent of Yellowknife households have affordability issues. That means there are 928 households struggling to come up with that 30 percent or more to help...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In short, I will be supporting this motion as it goes forward.

The lack of quality housing is a challenge in the North and when we make it completely unaffordable, the ground is never stable for a family. If you talk to all the housing experts out there, they’ll say that a good, solid home...An unaffordable home is one of the primary problems where problems at home start. They can’t afford to be there and all of a sudden it creates a ripple effect into other issues. It’s just an endless spiral.

I’m not convinced that if we move from 30 percent to 25 percent on the...

I thank the Minister and I will agree that the statistics speak for themselves. It’s a matter of how you put them in order. With 928 households through the housing survey still in need -- and he may want to suggest they have other options -- but with almost a zero percent vacancy rate in Yellowknife, options are few and far between. If the Minister is interested in advice -- and he’s gone through several Members today and it sounds like he’s taking advice today -- I would highlight the fact that one multi-family unit being built in Yellowknife does not address the affordability and suitability...

Clearly a one-size policy doesn’t fit anybody across the North. That approach certainly hasn’t addressed the adequacy issue. As I said in my Member’s statement, 928 people in Yellowknife alone, that’s 928 families alone are paying over 30 percent of their gross income on fixed expenses. I still haven’t heard how the Minister is addressing the affordability challenges in Yellowknife.

Mr. Speaker, if I could add one more issue to this particular problem in going forward, I would ask the Minister reach out to the Pharmacy Association of the Northwest Territories to engage maybe all their association and they could maybe leverage some of the expertise the association would have with their members and perhaps a collective approach could be given to help draw out the direction of this type of health care potential savings. I would hate to think that they would be excluded on any type of expertise that they would probably willingly offer to ensure that the government’s bottom...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In the Minister’s own words, he said that, for the outfitters, this is not a program for them. So, Mr. Speaker, if he is hearing from the outfitters that this program doesn’t work for them, I am hearing from outfitters myself still even just recently as in a few minutes before session started, in an e-mail that the ink isn’t even dry. The program doesn’t work and is not for them.

Mr. Speaker, the reality is the only person this program works for is the person who does the allocation of these funds who sits in some ivory tower office not understanding what it is really...

Mr. Speaker, the Minister defines it as a shift in the market. I would call it more like a tourniquet. The reality is there are no eco-tourists showing up at the door. The phone isn’t ringing off the hook. It would cost hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars to decommission these lodges. The outfitters are left holding the bag waiting for this turnaround in the caribou market, if I may define it as that, which is almost impossible. What is the government doing to help either sustain these lodges through this downshift, which is easily predictable in the area of three to five years they...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. For many years the outfitting industry has been significant to our northern economy. It has represented a good balance between tourism and promotion, conservation, economic investment, business and certainly local employment. For decades lodges brought tourists to the North. That was new money to our territorial economy that helped diversify our economy and certainly employ people.

In a market like ours, there was great confidence, and businessmen, women and families alike met that confidence with investment and kept investing in their lodges and in the North.

Now things...