Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m going to use my Member’s statement to talk about the facts, so here they are: In 2009 the NWT Community Housing Survey said that 19 percent of Northerners are in core need of housing. What matters little more than your health and your family than housing? Everything starts at home. While we continue to talk about revitalizing our declining population here in the Northwest Territories, we have communities suffering the negative effects of population leaving. But where do we start? Well, if there are no places to access housing, be it in Yellowknife, be it Paulatuk, be it Fort Good Hope, what do people do? People move to larger centres. What happens there? Their communities get smaller. Connect the dots – I hope the Finance Minister is – we have a declining population.
How do we get a teacher in a community that has no housing options? We’ve heard that complaint in Liard. We’ve heard that complaint in other small towns. How do we get a tradesperson in Norman Wells because they have nowhere to live? What about Tuktoyaktuk? What about even sometimes in Inuvik? These are real issues.
While this government continues to curl itself up with pipe dreams or focus in on its individual mining or fracking projects, it continues to forget about what matters to Northerners. We have to start at home. That’s where family is built and that is certainly where opportunities are built. In my view, what matters more than that? We want healthy families. We want housing options. They help families to be happy. They will have a better outlook. There have been many studies and many discussions over the years about family violence declines when suitable housing is there for people. These are all things that should be heralded by this government as job number one, but, again, focused in on the pipe dreams, mines and fracking, and other opportunities.
When they say they’re open for business, I ask, where? Because no business will come if they’ve got nowhere to live. I’ve heard from many people across the territory that they’d like to go to a small community but they don’t have the options. If you look at the average of this government right now, as I see in some scribbled notes in the backrooms, I see they’re going to implement less than one house, new house, across every community across the Northwest Territories.
What I’m saying is we have 33 communities in this territory, and we’re putting less than 33 new housing options on the ground in the North. Can we do better? I think we could do a lot better, because if we want to grow our population, as our Finance Minister says, if we want to get more investment from corporate and personal income tax, we’ve got to have people here, and those are the people who will help revitalize our North. Let’s get it done.
I’ll have questions, certainly, for the Minister of Housing to find out what he’s going to do.
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. The Member for Mackenzie Delta, Mr. Blake.
