Thank you, Mr. Speaker-elect. Obviously, we need to work with our federal partner to work on this like CMHC, as well as any other opportunities for money to come in. But to me the question was more about what are we going to do with our communities with respect to housing stock in our individual communities.
I've had an opportunity to travel to every community in the Northwest Territories and talk to residents from across the Northwest Territories. When you do travel to communities, one of the things that often comes up is housing. There are a number of really great programs in the NWT Housing Corp right now, and there have been significant changes over the last two Assemblies to things like rent scale. Even though that's happened, people are still frustrated. Some people still don't know what programs exist, or they know programs exist but they don't know how to access them and they don't understand what the requirements of them are, or worse, the programs are so strict or rigid that they're unable to access them, and they might be individuals who would be perfect candidates, with a little bit more flexibility in the program.
They've also told me that they don't usually see people from the Housing Corp out there talking to them and helping to customize programs to meet the needs of individual communities. There are different realities in every community through the Northwest Territories. Yes, we have to have some general guidelines, but we have to be willing to be flexible in order to meet the unique realities of different communities through the Northwest Territories and the different needs of communities through the Northwest Territories.
If I'm Premier, what I want to do is see the Ministers and the bureaucrats get out to the communities, talk to the individuals in the communities about the programs that are being delivered. Programs like housing. How can we change the way we're providing housing in a community like Paulatuk in order to truly meet the needs of the people? We need to do that by getting out and talking to people, not just working out of a Yellowknife office and looking at stats and reports. Good information, but get out and talk to the people and find out what's really going to make a difference for the people. Does that mean more duplexes? I expect that it might. Does it mean changing the layout of homes? It could. But you know who's going to be the best people to tell us that, Mr. Speaker-elect? The people in the communities. I'm going to encourage and require the departments to get out and talk to people throughout the Northwest Territories, to make sure that our programs meet the needs of people in all the communities throughout the Northwest Territories. Thank you.