Mr. Speaker, echoing my colleague from Frame Lake, year after year during capital budget deliberations in this House, MLAs stand up and say we are not spending enough money on public housing. So why does this keep happening if we all agree that housing is a top priority?
Historically, the colonial federal government forced Indigenous families off the land, away from their livelihoods, and into poorly constructed public housing. In the early '90s, the feds stopped building new public housing. Since then, public housing stock has fallen into disrepair and shrunk while waiting lists have continued to grow. As of 2020, the waiting list for NWT public housing was almost 1,000 families.
We have been told that we cannot take on additional public housing units even if another partner builds them for us. The three arguments seem to be, first, that there's no money for increasing the housing operations and maintenance project. Sure, we take on new capital and incorporate forced growth into our O and M all the time but for housing, apparently we can't afford it. Secondly, there's a belief that it should be a federal responsibility so we must advocate and then wait until they agree to take it on. Third, the feds are giving lots of housing money to Indigenous governments so we should just step out of the way and let them solve the housing crisis. The problem is that no Indigenous government that I know has indicated they want to take over public housing. Certainly, they're providing more opportunities for homeownership, allowing families with higher incomes to move out of public housing, but our economy is still so low in small communities and trauma is so high that there will continue to be a great need for public housing.
Nunavut is a territory that is ambitiously tackling its public housing needs through the Nunavut 3000 plan. Now, as an Indigenous government they can directly access more federal resources, but they're investing even more of their own resources. That's $560 million over eight years, and they're striving to build 1,400 new public housing units by 2030. Fundamentally, the GNWT needs to embrace its responsibility for public housing and allocate more of our own O and M budget to housing, not wait for the feds or Indigenous governments to save us. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Member from Yellowknife North. Members' statements. Member from Monfwi.
