Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The issue of arrears both on the mortgage side and the rent side is a significant one, pretty well near I believe to about $20 million. There’s a Shelter Policy review that was initiated late in the 16th Assembly that is going to be dealing with a lot of these pressing issues. Rent scales and the market rent are the programs we’ve designed, properly tailored for the communities so that we can put all the houses that are currently unoccupied to proper and good use.
People also have to realize there’s a personal responsibility issue, as well, and when I was Housing Minister my approach would be housing is not cheap and it’s not free, and when you look at the hierarchy of need that Maslow has, food and shelter are right at the bottom. So we’ve got to impress upon people that you have to pay your rent. It’s very important that you do that.
One of the things we’ve done over the years, not by being lax, is allowing to build up and to create an
impression and expectation among folks that they could pay their truck payments and skidoo payments and defer their rent and they’d get caught up later, which doesn’t tend to happen. I agree we have to look as a government to be very careful when one part of government, a Crown corporation, evicts a person in a community where there’s no other housing, what are the costs going to be and are we going to pay more as a government to put people in emergency housing or hotels as we sort out the issue with their rent. That is an issue that needs work that’s more functional in intergovernmental cooperation so that we’re not creating work for ourselves by one arm of government doing something that has an impact at a greater cost on another part of government, one pocket to another.
So a key piece, of course, is if we could encourage everybody to in fact pay their rent, make sure their rents are fair, and recognize that that is a fundamental need, and it’s not cheap and it’s not free. Thank you.