Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I, too, would like to make comments on the recent 2009 Community Housing Needs Survey. Last week we finished with the Minister of the corporation in terms of the budget. When I left and went upstairs, I received a phone call from a distraught senior in Fort Good Hope. She’s a retired social worker, she’s a senior, and she was looking for help with the Housing Corporation. She had to go through the whole bureaucratic administrative process and the application and the whole information gathering. She rushed to get all this information together so she could get the application into the office to receive assistance. She said when she got back from one of the communities, she opened a letter from the Housing Corporation and was just devastated because of the rejection by the Housing Corporation.
This senior here has a busted water tank, the pipes were all frozen, her grandchildren have to take showers and baths outside of her house, they have to use a honey bucket, they have to borrow a water tank to put it through the house. She said she gives a lot of her good work to the government and this is how they’re treating her.
In the 2009 survey the Sahtu region is at about 41 percent followed by Nahendeh at 32 percent, in the department of adequacy, which is about the physical conditions of places to live in a house with basic facilities to provide a safe and healthy place to live, such as running water, hot water, using the washroom, serious defects in the structure of the house. This lady here was really devastated, because she asked how she could get help. She’s worked with the Housing Corporation, she’s been a government employee, she’s retired, she just wants to live comfortably. This type of weather is cold and this type of application takes 10 to 12 weeks to get approval and be processed.
I’m going to ask the Minister how to administer the program so that people like this can receive assistance right away under emergency care or seniors care so she doesn’t have to live like this anymore.
