Thank you, Mr. Chair. I thank you for the opportunity today to talk about my priorities, and I thank the voters of Yellowknife Centre who decided I was the best choice for this job.
I want to start by repeating a sentence from Joseph Judas who addressed us on Saturday on behalf of the Tlicho government. He acknowledged the number of people who are homeless in Yellowknife, and he said, “Why are they on the street? What is the issue? If you can’t have a roof over your head, you can’t have a good life, a good sleep. That is a fact.”
What I heard about most when I was campaigning was about homelessness downtown. It is not a Yellowknife issue, it is a territorial issue. This is the territorial capital. It is the first place that people come usually when they fly into the North and what they see is that we have a severe problem with homelessness downtown. What I can tell you is that it takes many different forms and I’m going to talk a little bit about each one of them.
To start with I’ll talk about public housing. According to the 2014 NWT Housing Survey, 44 percent of households in non-market communities have a housing problem. That means that the House is in core need of repairs where systems are compromised, or it is unsuitable or isn’t large enough for the people who are living in it or it is inadequate in other ways. So the bad news is that this problem has only changed by 10 percent since 2009. The non-market communities are a little better off, but still 44 percent of the housing they have is not adequate for their needs. Meanwhile in Yellowknife, the amount of core housing need has gone up by 9 percent in all of those same areas, the need for repairs, suitability and adequacy.
The other thing that Yellowknife has that is unique to Yellowknife as a market community is an affordability problem. According to that same survey, 16 percent of households say they are paying more than 30 percent of their gross income on housing, which means they are overspending on housing. It means that their other expenses are going to be in jeopardy or not paid. They will be short of even the most basic things such as food and clothing.
There is a need for investment in housing that many Assemblies have spoken about, but this Assembly needs to be the Assembly that makes major investments in partnership with the federal government, with business, with NGOs, with the homeless people themselves. We need to make a major investment in housing all across the Northwest Territories. We need to take up the idea that there are different kinds of housing needed at different times in life. For example, we know seniors are also in desperate need of housing as the population continues to age. There is a greater demand for people to not only age in place, as Tom was talking about, but also to strengthen the continuum of housing so that people who need extra help because they have dementia, Alzheimer’s and other cognitive problems have access to that. It may not be possible to serve those needs in every small community, but we need to serve those needs. We can’t allow seniors to drift off on their own. I met too many people when I was campaigning who are seniors who are inadequately housed because they are not housed in safe situations. That is a need that we really need to take seriously.
We also need to look at the needs of people who are homeless. According to the City of Yellowknife who did a point in time count in May, there are 150 homeless people in Yellowknife. I personally think that number is very low. I think that the number is higher if you would include the invisible homeless population. Those are the people who are couch surfing, staying in relationships of convenience and so on in places that are unsuitable and unsafe for themselves and their families. So we need to look at what we can do for people who are homeless.
The most promising solution seems to be Housing First, which brings all the players to the table together to provide the home that Joseph Judas talked about, to have a roof over their heads, as a starting point to the rest of their lives. It’s not reasonable to expect people who are homeless to succeed in treatment, retraining, employment, or any other productive choice if they don’t actually have a place to live. So we need to start with that point.
The other point we need to start with is that a number of homeless people in Yellowknife are palliative addicts. That is to say they are addicts of drugs and alcohol and they are dying of their addictions, some more slowly than others. We would not allow people who were dying of cancer or diabetes or any other chronic disease to die in a stairwell, but that’s what is happening here in Yellowknife. People are dying on the streets, sometimes literally, like Raymond Simpson did in the spring. Other times they are dying in places where they are inappropriately housed without adequate supports. So we need to take care of their needs. This is an investment. This group of people costs the government a tremendous amount of money. Ambulance rides up and down Franklin Avenue to the hospital, time in the hospital itself in the emergency department as in-patients, time in jails, time in the court system. If we invested in homes for people who were homeless, I truly believe that our overall spending in those other areas would go down. As a result of that, I strongly encourage it.
The other area where there needs to be a greater investment in housing is for families, for poor families. The YWCA provides transitional and emergency housing at Rockhill and they could fill that building at least twice over on any given day of the week. That’s how great the demand for that housing is.
This program, which has security in the building and family support workers to support residents, is a kind of Housing First. According to an evaluation done on that program this year, it’s tremendously effective. People are able to stabilize there, regain custody of their children and learn new skills that will help them be successful when they are able to move into public housing or market housing. So, we need to invest more in housing for low-income families.
The next area I want to talk about is poverty. Seventeen percent of all NWT families live in poverty, meaning that they have less than have the median income, and 22 percent of children live in this situation. It’s easy to see that we are not keeping up with their needs, by looking at statistics produced by the Breakfast for Learning Program as an example. They served, NWT-wide, 1.7 million meals in 2014. So, children are hungry. We heard that on the radio this morning when the caller phoned in from Tuktoyaktuk and talked about hunger. Hunger is a reality and we have not been able to figure out systematic solutions to this. The growth in the gardening movement is very helpful, but it’s not enough year-round to keep people from being hungry and especially to keep these children from being hungry. Until we have children who are adequately housed where they can rest, and adequately fed so they don’t have the stress of wondering where their next meal is, I feel that investment in other forms of promoting their education is not going to be as successful as it could be, because they need to have that foundation to grow from.
I also want to reiterate the points I have heard here today to invest in the zero to three-year-old population in order to have the best start possible in life. We know from research that by the time children are three years old, many of their major development functions are in place, so we need to support that as much as we are able to.
I am going to talk a little bit about family violence. Between December 2011 and December 2012, six women were murdered in the Northwest Territories and five of them were murdered by men who were known to them. This is just the worst end of the spectrum of family violence that plagues this territory at nine times the national average.
I know that people care about reducing family violence, but we need to invest in that. We can’t put all our investment into one week of awareness a year and expect that we are really going to make a change in the rates of family violence in the NWT. This has to be a year-round priority so that family violence becomes as unacceptable as drinking and driving and smoking in a restaurant, that people understand this behaviour is wrong and it is not publically tolerated.
Just briefly, I realize that I haven’t touched on economic issues. It is not that they don’t exist in my platform but rather they have been very thoroughly canvassed here. I am very interested in seeing good planning for diversification of our economy following on the decline of the diamond mines and to invest in those areas which have already shown promising returns, which include manufacturing, fishing, trapping, gardening on a commercial scale. I think that we should look very closely at what more we can do to support those ventures, because they create employment and they create options for people to stay in their community and do meaningful work even though those jobs do not create the same wealth that mining does.
Lastly, I just want to talk a little bit about governance. That was certainly an issue when I was canvassing. People felt, for better or worse, that the last Assembly had become a very partisan place and they really want to see better communication between the Regular MLAs and Cabinet and to see that we are all getting along to the best extent that we can. As Ethel said on Saturday, fighting divides you and prevents you from reaching your objects. So, while that is a rather bold statement and we are certainly all getting along now, I would like to think that we are all going to get along into the future, as well, so that we can work on behalf of the people of the Northwest Territories. I want to say that I support the mid-term review of the performance of the Executive Council and Premier against the priorities set by the Assembly as a way for us to report on our progress, or the lack of it. I think people have shown a real appetite for new transparency and inclusion of them in our governance and we need to honour that.
Finally, and of course very importantly, I want to see women at the table whenever possible. The only way we are going to have more women elected to this Legislature is to have more women in public life in leadership roles who are role models to young women who are thinking about how they can serve the Northwest Territories. I am hopeful that we will always consider that when we are planning public events, that we will include women as leaders whenever possible to encourage the next generation of women leaders. Thank you.