Shauna Morgan

Thank you, Mr. Chair. That's all my questions on this page.

Mr. Speaker, lots of people here in Yellowknife dream of being able to afford their own home, but more people in small NWT communities can't even dream about it because the path to homeownership is barely possible. And it wasn't always this way. This is a story that many others in this room know much better than me.

Obviously, people used to build their own homes where they wanted, then the federal government started pushing people into government housing around the late 1950s with the promise of $2 a month rent. And sometimes the government actively demolished the homes that people had built...

Okay, thank you, Madam Chair. I'm going to switch gears a little bit and point -- so, like, the line item for homeownership entry level and market housing programs.

So I know that are plans to discontinue the homeownership entry level program, and I understand that the goal when this program was started was to allow people to transition towards owning those units, and some people have been in there -- those units for a long time and never have been able to or wanted to transition to homeownership, so it was sort of decided, I guess, enough is enough and we just discontinued the program. But it...

Thank you, Madam Chair. So if we had $38.6 million available to reinvest last year, can the Minister tell me how much of that was reinvested specifically in repairing vacant units? Thank you, Madam Chair.

Okay, thank you for that. We can establish that as of last year, there was $38.6 million available to be reinvested. Can the Minister confirm whether that has now all been spent and that Housing NWT is back down to the minimum amount that it needs to hold onto just, as we've said before, for payroll and contractors. Has that 38.6 sort of extra net assets that could be reinvested has it been reinvested to date? Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Madam Chair. So I won't be supporting this motion. I agree that the loss of the community learning centres has been devastating, and I think this motion goes the wrong direction towards righting that wrong. I do think that the department of ECE needs to expedite, or as quickly as possible, untangle the exact amount of funding to take away from the allocation to Aurora College that would have gone to these community learning centres. I know that still has to be worked out because there's some aspects of adult education that the college is continuing to do, but as soon as possible we...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And I apologize for that oversight.

Does the Minister happen to know whether programs such as the housing maintainer program or even the building trades helper program has to be -- is offered only at the campus communities or whether it's being offered in other NWT communities where people live, to be able to take those courses? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And I appreciate that there's few details available right now and lots of unknowns, but does ECE plan to reach out to Aurora College and its current staff working at the literacy outreach centre, who have been informed that they will lose their jobs, but to see if an arrangement could be made, for example, to continue using the college's classroom space and to communicate the efforts underway to find a path forward for this program? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My first set of questions is for the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment. So the literacy outreach centre here in Yellowknife has been a partnership between Aurora College and inclusion NWT since 1997, and that program even won the Premier's Award in 2023 for its excellent results. So given that enrolment has consistently been high with 39 students in the current winter semester, it came as a shock that Aurora College recently announced it would pull out of the program as part of its closure of the community learning centres, leaving the program to be shut...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, with NWT communities reeling from the news that Aurora College is giving up on community learning centres, I wanted to highlight a successful grassroots literacy and essential skills initiative for young adults that is set to expand. It is a youth employment skills partnership between the NWT Literacy Council and Ilitaqsiniq based in Nunavut and is supported by federal funding. It's designed to help youth aged 16 to 29 gain essential work skills and gain more confidence in their communication and language skills. A brandnew cohort is set to start within the...