Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Given the current landscape of increased costs of electricity for all, it is comforting to know that the NWT Housing Corporation recently launched a new utility tracking system that captures utility consumption for all our Housing Corporation assets. Knowing that the current NWT Housing Corporation clients pay a substantially reduced rate for power, and I believe it’s around nine cents and the taxpayer is subsidizing the remainder, it is within this context that I wish to address the Minister responsible.
We know with this new utility tracking system we are now able to see trends in power consumption within Housing Corporation assets.
Can the Minister indicate to the House what are some of these preliminary findings? Thank you.
Thank you Mr. Dolynny. Minister responsible for NWT Housing, Mr. McLeod.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We started tracking the utility consumption at the unit level in April of this year. We capture the information for electricity, water and municipal services and usage of electricity, water, municipal services and heating fuel. We’re still early in the process. We just had an opportunity to do it through the spring and summer, so it’s not going to give us very accurate data right now. As we go into the winter season and the usage picks up, then I think after about a year we should have some pretty solid baseline data and see what the trends are, and then we’d be able to make some adjustments.
I appreciate the Minister’s response to that, and it is an exciting time. I guess the overarching question is how will this new data be shared publicly?
We will include this information in our annual report and then in our performance measures as we publish this part of the business plans. We are also happy to make this information available on our website. Once we start gathering a bit more solid baseline data, we will put that up on our website as well.
Keeping confidentiality in mind here and knowing full well that some of this information will be in real time here, will users know where they stand on usage versus other corporation clients? Again, keeping confidentiality in mind, will someone be able to pull up the information and compare them versus what the average is, let’s say, in that LHO area?
The public housing clients pay a portion of their electricity bill, and I think the Member pointed out before, it’s nine cents a kilowatt hour, so they’d be aware of the usage through their monthly bill. For heating fuel and water, we don’t currently report usage back to individual clients. Once we have the baseline data over a one-year period, we can look at how we can report the usage back to the clients. We have to ensure that it’s not administratively burdensome to the LHOs, but once we start gathering more baseline data, then we’ll look at our options of providing this information back to the individual clients.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Dolynny.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Knowing this new information might reveal high housing corporation users of heavily subsidized power, what safeguards, actions or practices will the NWT Housing Corporation use to mitigate these high users? Will the Housing Corporation initiate any form of capping of power subsidies to these potential high users in the future?
Again, because we’re early in this and we need some longer term baseline information to better identify the high users, I think we’ll be able to do that, and once we all identify the high users, we can work with the local housing authorities to work with those particular clients to make them aware of the usage. This will also help us in our energy retrofits. If we find a unit in a community is costing us a lot more, depending on the family size, the unit size, then that would be a prime candidate for some of our major modernization and improvement programs. We’ll be using all that information. But at the end of the day, we will work with the clients that we identify to see if there are ways that they could cut back on the usage.
Thank you, Mr. McLeod. The Member for Hay River South, Mrs. Groenewegen.
