Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Thank you very much, colleagues, for allowing me to continue on with this motion.
WHEREAS the NWT Housing Corporation implemented new public housing rent scales on July 1, 2012, including new criteria for determining tenant household income in order to assess their rent;
AND WHEREAS the new criteria for household income includes child tax benefits which were not previously assessed as income;
AND WHEREAS federal and territorial tax benefits are intended to help eligible families with the cost of raising children under 18 years of age;
AND WHEREAS the Government of the Northwest Territories Income Support Program does not include child tax benefits other than the National Child Benefit Supplement for the purpose of its household income assessments;
AND WHEREAS by clawing back child tax benefits, the NWT Housing Corporation is working at cross-purposes with other territorial and federal programs;
NOW THEREFORE I MOVE, seconded by the honourable Member for Sahtu, that the NWT Housing Corporation immediately ceases treating child tax benefits as income for the purpose of calculating public housing rents;
AND FURTHER, that the Government of the Northwest Territories work to identify and eliminate other similar inconsistencies in the subsidy programs;
AND FURTHERMORE, that the Government of the Northwest Territories provide a response to this motion within 120 days.
Thank you, Mr. Menicoche. There is a motion on the floor. The motion is in order. To the motion.
Question.
Mr. Menicoche, to the principle of the bill.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I just wanted to add some context to the motion. I love our consensus-style government. This issue was raised by a young lady from Fort Simpson in July or August when she wanted to give her income statements to the Housing Corporation for public housing rent. She contacted me right away, as her MLA, and said, they started using my child tax benefit as income. She said she doesn’t understand. That money is for milk and pampers; it’s not for rent.
That is the whole purpose of our subsidy programs territorially and federally. It is about assisting those that need it. Here we have a case, because we made a change to our housing program, we are including it as income. Technically, that is clawing back a subsidy that eligible families are getting. That is just not right at all.
One of the goals of our 17th Assembly is about reducing the cost of living. In this case, we are actually increasing the cost of living because we are using that little Child Tax Benefit and calling it income. Therefore, her rent would go up. That is inconsistent with the goals we as the Assembly set when we were elected in 2011. In fact, we should be lowering it.
With that, that just sets the context of this. It wasn’t there before. The corporation is not going to lose any revenue, because they weren’t getting any revenue off of it if anyway, so I say take it out and ask my colleagues on this side of the House to support me in asking the government to remove this one little thing to make life a little easier for our residents in the Northwest Territories. Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Menicoche. Mr. Yakeleya.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to thank the honourable Member for Nahendeh for bringing this motion to the floor and having some discussion on it this afternoon. I have also been contacted by some people in the Sahtu region. I didn’t quite understand the issue until I looked into it further.
Regarding the rent scale, I applaud the Minister. We have worked through the issue of how to reduce the cost of living in our smaller communities up in the Sahtu, of Fort Good Hope, Deline, Norman Wells and Tulita. Further north the cost of living is very high. Actually, I was up in Ulukhaktok. I couldn’t believe it. Minister Ramsay and I were up there at one time. We were walking through the store. We couldn’t believe the prices they were paying up there in Ulukhaktok, in terms of the Northern Store. It is just ridiculous. A box of Pampers we looked at – we took some pictures, actually – a box of Pampers in the Northern Store was well over $60 or $70. That is ridiculous for the cost of living in the Northwest Territories.
We know that Housing is putting a lot of money into accommodating single mothers, the parents. It is tough enough for them to survive even in Sachs Harbour. There was a study done that you had to make at least $90,000 a year just to make it by, just to have your head above the poverty line. That is ridiculous for the families in our small communities, single parents, where unemployment is sometimes 80 percent.
In Fort Good Hope the unemployment rate is about 80 percent. People are struggling. They get a child tax benefit that goes to help them with the children, with the family, the clothes, and yet they are being used as a means to calculate their rent through household income. That policy is from the federal government. We have made some efforts to change that in the past Assemblies, but we couldn’t get it. We couldn’t get to make that change because that is a federal government policy. We are following the federal government’s rules.
We have to, through this motion, do what we can to help the single mothers, the single families and the children in regard to this small benefit they get from the federal government and not have it included in the rental assessment.
One department does it; another department doesn’t. There is no consistency. I ask, through this Assembly, to take some serious consideration, look at the costs, look at the comparison and give that benefit to the young families in our smaller communities. It is very difficult. When we leave here and when we go back to our communities, we know the struggles that they go through and how hard it is to live in our small communities.
Like I said, I will ask the Members to think about this. Think about the children. Think about the families. Think about this issue here that we are bringing forward and ask the government if they would consider strongly to remove this from the NWT Housing Corporation policy and see if we can get some support. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. To the motion. Ms. Bisaro.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I rise in support of this motion. I believe very strongly in the comments that have been made by my colleagues already. This is a small amount of money which does have a huge impact on families. It does allow them to provide for their children in ways that they would not be able to if their rent has been increased. I am particularly concerned about the inconsistencies that we have in our policies across government. We assess our income for a particular program one way in one department. We assess it differently in a different department. It is no wonder that our residents are confused about what documents they need when they go to apply for a program.
I think that both parts of this motion are equally important for me. Personally, I think the second part of the motion is more important. We need to look across government to determine how we are assessing income. There is no reason, in my mind, why it needs to be different for one program than for the other. I think it will make it easier for our residents certainly. It will make it easier for our staff, I think. If they changed departments, for instance, they don’t need to relearn all over again how to calculate or make an assessment for income.
I am fully supportive of the motion. I would like to thank the Member for bringing it forward and the seconder for also supporting the motion. I would urge my colleagues to vote in favour. Thank you.
Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. To the motion. Mr. Nadli.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I rise on this occasion to also speak in favour of this motion. I think in small communities it is very hard just getting by, especially when circumstances have you being a single mother with children to look after. Unfortunately, the system sometimes doesn’t work for people that struggle. Sometimes we need to make a decision to respond to the needs of people.
In this case, I applaud the mover and the seconder on this motion for taking the initiative and the stand, and being the voice of people that really need assistance on this case. With that, I support this motion. Mahsi.
Thank you, Mr. Nadli. To the motion. Mr. McLeod.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We respect the intent of this motion. However, we have made a number of changes over the last number of years, I think, that made it a lot easier for those that are struggling to maintain their residence.
Somebody talked about making life easier. I think we’ve done that. Somebody mentioned a single mother and we use the example of a single mother who’s working, under the old system she was paying close to $900. Under the new system she’s paying just over $300, so that’s a significant savings that she could apply back to putting food on the table for her family. So we have made a lot of progress as far as that goes.
We can make an argument that all other types of income should not be included and that’s the reason why we got into the shotgun approach rent scale that we had before where we had 442 different rents. Now we have, probably, 22. This makes it fairly consistent for all people and the reception out there has been very good.
The Members talk about the inconsistencies of the programs offered by the government, and we have some programs in the Housing Corp where we don’t assess particular incomes that may be assessed somewhere else. There is a point there that we may have to have a look at. As far as the Housing Corporation goes, I think we`ve made a lot of changes and we continue to make changes that benefit people.
One of the things we’ve made a commitment to doing – and I`ve had this discussion with committee – is we try to stay out of the day-to-day financial lives of our tenants. Before, anything, if you made a bingo, that would be assessed and that’s why we got into the trouble we were in. So we decided to stay out of that and make the rents very consistent. You know from up to a certain amount that you’re only going to be paying this set amount of rent and I think it’s been well received out there.
Again, we respect the intent of the motion and we hear where Members are coming from. If we start making exemptions for all other income, we’ll get back to the place that we were in before. I know folks out there are not going to be too pleased with that.
Mr. Speaker, because this is direction to Cabinet, we will be abstaining from the vote. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. I will have closing remarks by the mover, Mr. Menicoche.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m actually appalled by the resistance of the Minister on this motion to make changes. In fact, Cabinet shouldn’t abstain, they should vote against it if they are that adamant that they don’t want to make another change. The motion is quite simple, Mr. Speaker. They didn’t have it as income before. The ECE subsidy program doesn’t include the child tax benefit. So we are just asking them to revisit this, look at it. If you want to be consistent, reasonable and fair to our constituents and residents of the Northwest Territories, then you should apply the rules right across. Let them keep that little benefit. That’s all we’re asking. Review the programs and make them consistent so that all people understand.
