Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to start off today by thanking the NWT Construction Association, which held a meeting last Friday to talk about 300 homes for 300 families. They want to find a way to help attract people to the Northwest Territories. I must highlight that they’ve really sparked off the debate as to where some of our financial and long-term visions should lie. Certainly, they’ve nailed it down to one of the biggest problems we have here in the North. The Construction Association has clearly identified that housing is a serious problem here in the North and, certainly, housing availability is one of the problems I’m talking about.
This year Diavik announced an expansion of its communities that they will be picking up employees from. With that lies an opportunity for this government to say maybe we can expand the population of our Northwest Territories and work with these organizations and businesses that need more employees. The bottom line is they need more places to live.
If I provide a small snapshot, we recently heard the Minister of Finance talk about the 18 percent vacancy in the Northwest Territories government. We’ve heard that at least one mining sector would like to bring another 300 families to the Northwest Territories. We’ve always heard that the federal government would like to expand some of the opportunities here in the North by at least 100 federal families. Even if we just did a modest number, we could attract, of a three-person family, another 4,000 people here if we showed some real initiative by helping with the cost of living for development to help produce houses.
Recently we’ve heard some good vision from the Minister of ITI on the Look Up North campaign to attract southern workers to our northern environment. But the question really then lies: where would we put them? Nowhere. In some cases apartments are the solution for some people, but in other cases families would like homes. Money isn’t getting any cheaper at the bank rates. Why are we not taking a look at this seriously to help support our municipalities to expand land development, to help curb some of the costs of that development? The opportunity is right in front of us.
If numbers are what they want to hear, I will tell the Finance Minister, which he knows, that in the last budget cycle we had $25 million less in corporate and personal income taxes. If we attracted just the people I talked about, we’d have $27 million in new transfer payments according to the agreement we have today.
Later today I will have questions for the Minister responsible for cost of living, the Strategic Initiatives committee, and we’ll discuss the issues then.
Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. The honourable Member for Kam Lake, Mr. Ramsay.
