Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Following my colleagues, I, too, will be talking about housing.
Over the last year I have had an opportunity to get into a number of the communities. In pretty much every community we go to, one of the issues that comes up over and over again is housing, whether it is about affordability, accessibility or suitability.
There has been a lot of talk about arrears and vacant units and rent costs, as well as lack of flexibility within the Housing Corporation itself when it is delivering programs. To the Minister’s credit, I have heard some movement from the Minister. He is committed to getting rid of the vacancies, which I applaud. He is committed to working with the LHOs to find out whose arrears are real and whose arrears may not be real based on the move to Education and back. I applaud the Minister for that.
But one area I haven’t seen a lot of movement on, and I think there is certainly room for movement, is flexibility. I will give you an example of what I’m talking about.
Earlier this month I attended the Prospects North conference. While I was there, I was talking to an economic development officer from one of the smaller communities. He indicated to me that a mining company had been in touch with him. He was looking for 13 labourers to come and work for a three-week period. This mining company was going to pay quite well. The EDO officer went out into the community to find people and there were enough people to fill those 13 temporary jobs, but he couldn’t find anybody who was willing to take the jobs even though the money was good, because every one of them was concerned that if they took the job, the rent would immediately go up and they would be working for nothing or very little. Five dollars, $10 or even $100 to go and do three weeks of hard labour when you can stay home and watch TV and not be any better, or worse off, lacks common sense.
Our programs have led people to make these types of decisions, which is unfortunate. We need to be working with people to get them back out into the workforce, where appropriate and where possible.
Later today I will be talking more during the motions about flexibility that this government, this Housing Corporation, needs to put in place to ensure that we are providing incentives to people to go back to work, and we are encouraging people to go back to work even if that means we have to not do immediate collections once people start working or tier a payment system back into place. There is room for flexibility here. We need to find it and we need to work with our clients to help them get back into the workforce and get off public housing. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. The honourable Member for Nahendeh, Mr. Menicoche.
