Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In my Member’s statement I indicated a date of 2038, 25 years away. I will be, roughly, about 75 years old. I want to ask the Minister, what then? Once the social funding is done with the federal government, are we moving towards where people in the Northwest Territories will then all own the 2,400 units that are right now in stock?
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. The honourable Minister responsible for the NWT Housing Corporation, Mr. Robert McLeod.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. First of all I want to correct the Member. The Member will be 79 years old in 2038, because I’ll be 78. We continue to raise this issue with our counterparts in Ottawa. We try to get them to see the fact that it is affecting how we administer public housing. I think, between now and then, if they don’t move on this, a lot of decisions may have to be made within the Housing Corporation and the government as to what exactly we want to be. Do we want to be just a social housing provider, or continue with all the programs that we offer now?
I want to ask the Minister, did he say “roughly”? I will be roughly about 78, quick calculations. I want to ask the Minister, is this something we could look at on a territorial strategy for housing, or national housing strategy, that we can think about these types of things that are going to be put onto our future generations with regard to housing in the Northwest Territories?
We do have our Building for the Future, the Northwest Territories strategy for housing looking into the future. There probably is a lot of work that’s going on nationally. A lot of the communities and jurisdictions down south, I think, are going to feel the effect a lot more than we are because their public housing and social housing portfolios are much larger than ours. It is a great concern across this country, not only for us but it affects us quite a bit because we have a majority of our houses, especially in the small communities, that are public housing partly funded by the money that we get from CMHC. We have our strategy and we continue to try and look at ways that we can make improvements to how we do business, cut down the cost of operating our social housing, removing some of public housing from stock. We’ve been quite busy working on our plans and dealing with the declining CMHC funding.
I was reading a book, and in the book there was a quote that said the home is the heart of the nation. In 2038, if that’s the case with the federal government, they’re going to rip the heart of our nation out here. I want to ask the Minister – I know he’s working hard on reducing the public housing units and in regard to his strategy – will this strategy meet the point in 25 years that we will not have any public housing? Will all those homes belong to people in our communities?
We would have to look at that. Ultimately, our goal in the Northwest Territories Housing Corporation is to try and see as many homeowners as possible. We have to recognize, also, that there is always going to be a need for public housing and public housing clients. It’s a bit of a balancing act and we have to weigh those out. Ultimately, we’d like to get people into home ownership. Some of the changes that we want to make now will probably have long-term effects and we’ll have to wait until 2038, if things don’t change by then, to see where the Northwest Territories is at as far as providing housing. We do know that we are trying to address the issue and we’ll continue to do so. That includes bringing our concerns to the federal Minister and the federal government.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Final supplementary, Mr. Yakeleya.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Minister earlier made a ministerial statement on MACA and talked about community ownership and community involvement in planning. I want to ask the Minister if his government colleagues have talked about some type of territorial housing strategy sometime within the life of this government to look at year 2038.
As I mentioned before, we do have the Building for the Future, a strategic framework for housing that we just recently completed. In there it talks about a lot of the ways that we want to deal with the declining CMHC funding. Also, the Member talked about communities. We’ve had communities in the past that have taken on the responsibility of administering their own public housing and realized that it was a lot more than they had bargained for, so they had turned the administration back over to the NWT Housing Corporation. We’re always open to partnerships. I think we’ve proven that in the past. We’d be more than willing to sit down with any community government that has some kind of desire to administer social housing and public housing in their community. However, we will make sure they realize it’s a huge challenge and they need to be ready for it.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. The honourable Member for Yellowknife Centre, Mr. Hawkins.
