Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, today we are attempting to shed some light on the challenges of affordable and accessible housing for northerners. Mr. Speaker, shelter is a basic necessity in life common to every person. In some circumstances, it is necessary for governments to become involved in meeting the needs of our people for adequate housing. As with everything we attempt to do, we are confined by fiscal realities. It is incumbent on us as legislators when developing programs, policies and investing in capital infrastructure, to ensure we balance the need for accountability with the need for flexibility and sensitivity to the realities of the very people we are trying to help.

Our role in meeting the needs of our constituents for basic housing should be a role that provides for fairness in affordability for those with financial challenges, adequacy for persons with special needs related to physical challenges and availability, where options are limited. All of these considerations must be applied with the ever constant factor of the diversity of our communities, urban or remote, market or non-market, et cetera.

Mr. Speaker, we also need to consider whether the shelter we provide is more appropriate through ownership incentives or on the basis of rental. A couple of areas I would like to focus on today are the flexibility that we allow local housing organizations to operate within, in meeting what can be sometimes the unique circumstances in their community and the needs of their clients; and two, how responsive are delivery of housing and investment in capital to the needs of our communities. For example, I believe that some policies have been developed and implemented which have created a serious hardship for public housing tenants. The application in the new rent scale in non-market communities did not provide enough time for tenants to make the transition from rents assessed for low incomes to the higher incomes many have experienced from opportunities created by development that’s taking place.

If there are no houses on the market for sale, we did not give tenants enough time to transition into homeownership without assessing rents that were excessively high. For example, we know that when applying for mortgage financing, the first question asked is related to income: How long have you been employed? So a young couple suddenly blessed with a good job at the diamond mine would need time to consider construction and homeownership or rental options.

To my second point, we can’t afford any housing boondoggles with our limited available capital. Too often we have gone into communities with the government-knows-best attitude to solving housing problems, only to find out later that there weren’t any updates.

Mr. Speaker, I seek unanimous consent to conclude my statement.

Speaker: MR. SPEAKER

The Member is seeking unanimous consent to conclude her statement. Are there any nays? There are no nays. You may conclude your statement, Mrs. Groenewegen.

Jane Groenewegen

Hay River South

Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and thank you, colleagues. Mr. Speaker, this has resulted in situations like seniors' complexes sitting empty or underutilized and then market housing mobile units sitting empty.

Much planning and consultation must go into these types of initiatives with the clients they are intended to serve, prior to investing. Capital investment should be approached with a business plan no less thorough than if we were investing our own private money.

Mr. Speaker, I am not suggesting that there are simple solutions to the housing needs. These needs require careful exploration from the benefit of input from affected stakeholders. We can’t afford investments and policies that miss the target of meeting the needs and assuring adequate, affordable and accessible housing for those who depend on us for it. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

---Applause