Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In some ways, my questions continue on from my colleague. In my statement today I talked about the growth of the Housing First program throughout the NWT and the success it has had moving chronically homeless people out of shelters and into stable transitional housing. It's very clear that the demand for Housing First has outstripped supply. Can the Minister tell us what advice he is including in his departmental transition report on Housing First? Thank you.
Masi. Minister responsible for the Northwest Territories Housing Corporation.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We will just obviously continue on this theme here. Here in Yellowknife, we have been working with a lot of our partners in terms of addressing some of the housing needs. Obviously, we do have the Housing First program; we have the rapid rehousing program with YWCA; and the Yellowknife Women's Society, we did make a good announcement; we are working with industry to see how we can address housing here in the Northwest Territories; Northern Pathways to Housing program that we have in the three communities that I just previously mentioned, we have been working with ECE and working with Health and Social Services to see how we can increase our shelter funding for homeless shelters and how it's just a one-stop program for applications to address that need. So there are a lot of things that have been going on over this government, and any input that Members and any input that our leadership across the territories and our non-governmental organizations can give us, we are willing to work with them, and we just need to sit down and have those discussions. The big one announcement that we have given was the co-investment fund and how can we access that and have a bigger partnership to address homelessness and transition or even housing needs of the NWT.
I appreciate that, not only does the Minister buy half-page ads to talk about his successes, he also gobbles up question period to do the very same thing. The City of Yellowknife has attempted to count the number of homeless people in Yellowknife, and I would like to know very specifically, without the words "community plan," is that work to understand to full dimensions of homelessness being undertaken in any other communities?
Obviously, the Northern Pathways to Housing program is one of our successes that we have seen, and we will continue to work on that. It's a piloted project. I just want to also say, Mr. Speaker, our staff have been doing a great job in meeting with our leadership, meeting with our non-government organizations to address homelessness, and we all need to work together. I think that's one of things that we came out of the housing summit that was up in Inuvik. We also have the Reaching Home program that we are pushing out, and our staff has been trying to get out to as many communities as they can across the NWT. Initially, we were looking at three community housing plans in this initial year, as a pilot program. After myself and the staff have been meeting with leadership, we have 12. I made a statement last week that we have 12 community plans on the go to address the housing needs in each of the communities.
So I just want to let all Members know and leadership, you know: reach out to us; we are willing to work with you, but we are going above and beyond to address the housing issues across the Northwest Territories, and our staff are working very hard to make sure that happens.
Masi. Oral questions. Member for Deh Cho.
