Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I spoke about so many housing issues, transitional housing and homelessness, and I’d like to ask the Minister responsible for the NWT Housing Corporation some questions.
I’d like to know if the Housing Corporation has been working on any plans for transitional housing options for the regions and communities. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Menicoche. Minister responsible for NWT Housing Corporation, Mr. McLeod.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Member had mentioned before on the core needs study that was done in 2009, and since 2009, as a government, I think we’ve spent over $151 million across the territory to try and address some of the issues contained in that report. There was $17.5 million in Nahendeh alone, plus an additional $5.7 million, I think, we’re debating this year and I’m glad for that.
As far as working on transitional housing goes, we are currently looking at a new initiative where we’ll identify some communities that could possibly have one of our housing units there converted into a bit of a transitional home. It’s a start. It’s not going to address all of the concerns, but we need to start somewhere and we feel that’s a good start. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Certainly, that last report was in 2009. As I said, great strides have been done with that to take care of the housing that’s in core need. But for this House, one of our challenges is, of course, to address homelessness.
I know that the Minister is working with the Social Envelope Committee, but can he tell me a little bit about the strategy and what we’re going to do about the homeless, especially in the small communities?
Mr. Speaker, we have a homelessness coordinator who was hired in August. She is actually planning on going to all regions in the Northwest Territories, compiling some data, a bit of a report, and then we’ll take that report and look at that as possibly a future way that we can allocate more funds into some of the communities again.
The pilot project I spoke of is a start. Once we hear back from our new homelessness coordinator, we look forward to working with the Members and seeing what we can provide to some of the communities that are most in need. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
I certainly look forward to working with the homelessness coordinator as she tours my communities.
I’d like to ask the Minister, in terms of homelessness, I know that here in Yellowknife, of course, it’s a much larger centre and they’re able to have O and M to address homelessness.
Is this the type of thinking they will be having when they go out to the communities and have their scoping sessions? Thank you.
Mr. Speaker, Yellowknife is a much larger community and a lot of people do come here and end up homeless. We recognize that. We work with some of the organizations in Yellowknife and provide some type of funding. Most of it is on the infrastructure side, but we make contributions. It’s starting to be recognized that out in the communities it is getting to be more and more of a problem. We have replacement public housing units we’re hoping to put into some of these communities. I think we’ve identified 14 for the Nahendeh this year, but that still is not going to address the homeless.
There are many reasons that people could be homeless and it’s a cross-departmental exercise that we’re going through with my colleagues on the Social Envelope Committee. So we have to identify some of these situations and see what we can do as a government to try to assist them.
Again, the new initiative we have is a start and we’re hoping to build on that. Thank you.
As we move towards this, can the Minister indicate who would be the proponent in this case? Will he be working with the band councils or else any interest groups out there that want to do a ground-based proposal that are interested in providing this kind of service? Thank you.
Thank you. We’d be more than willing to listen to all proposals that come in from the community. As I said before, we’ve made contributions in the past to some of the infrastructure side of it. The O and M, we haven’t made too many contributions to that. With the new initiatives, again, we’re looking at a partnership with a local organization and we will provide the infrastructure again, and we’ll work with them to see if there’s an agreement we can work out where they provide kind of the supervision of the place.
So as we roll out the details on that, I will be sharing it with committee members and we still haven’t made a determination as to where the pilot projects are going. I think we’d look at some of the communities that are most in need and work on that. Some of the larger regional centres we’d look at too.
So we look forward to working with the Members and we’ll update them as we make progress. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. The Member for Hay River South, Mrs. Groenewegen.
