Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Notwithstanding the Minister’s good catch-up work described in his statement today, inadequate housing and the delivery of our housing programs remains a huge issue today. For everyone -- workers, parents, children, elders -- the home is the foundation of health. No one can participate fully in society without a place to store and cook food, to sleep, bathe, do laundry, homework, and host friends.
Adequate, accessible and affordable. The latest core needs survey tells us that things continue to grow worse in all these areas. Just having a house isn’t enough. Issues of overcrowding, poor condition and high cost are almost as crippling as the lack of a home.
The affordability figures are startling. Recent figures indicate you must have household incomes of $74,000 to $107,000 to rent privately or own and operate a residence in communities such as Ulukhaktok, Fort Liard, Wekweeti, Fort Resolution and Norman Wells, and even Yellowknifers face high costs as well.
What does this mean? It means many people must live in public housing. It means that, no less than health care, housing must be viewed as a social program with government supplementing costs because real costs are simply beyond many people’s means.
This brings in the administrative side of meeting social needs. While we see progress on rental arrears, local housing authorities continue to suffer budget penalties because of gaps between rents they are expected to collect and those they can realistically collect. For example, one LHO with improved collections of outstanding rents is still being penalized $300,000 per year for uncollected rents. The uncollected amount comes off the next year’s funding. How does that work for bookkeeping and sustainable programs?
No matter how much money LHOs collect, their costs don’t go down and the need for housing only grows. Viewed as a social program, rent collection has nothing to do with an LHO’s responsibility to deliver programs. Removing funding from the next year’s budget does nothing but worsen the situation. When delivering a social program, negative bookkeeping helps nothing. These are difficult issues and I’ll be asking the Minister questions, time permitting, today.
Thank you, Mr. Bromley. The honourable Member for Yellowknife Centre, Mr. Hawkins.
