Mr. Chairman, the community,
in itself, I would think at the outset would want to keep their housing committee, but at this point the housing committee does not report to the local authority. They report outwardly. There is no intention of doing away with their function, but who do they report to, who are they accountable to, and how do they get into the mix so that those local priorities can be set? In terms of making decisions, sometimes even here we sit and try to take away one function, saying that it is not needed, but that does impact on another department.
The community of Tuk has talked about taking over these responsibilities, and what they find is that we have a lot of disjointed community organizations and they fall apart in the end, because there is not really a strong support group that would ongoingly take into consideration what each is doing, and the function would be hedged into the local authority, whoever that would be. There are some areas where there are bands, and some areas in the far Arctic have communities which do not have as much of a problem because they are hamlet councils.
The communities themselves really have a difficult time because the local municipality will zone and put together some lots that are available and the housing association will do something else; so they deal with the Housing Corporation regional office and really do not know how those houses are going to be planned. In the end, somebody who needs a lot just does not have the lot preparation. There is no community planning as a total package so that everyone knows what others are doing, and when you put gravel on, what your plans are to go to certain types of housing.
This is not the idea of doing away with the local housing administration facility, although I could see that the administration may be that they want to take on all of the public housing repairs. There are all kinds of things that they could do, but it is just to try to co-ordinate it at a community level so that everyone knows what is going on, and then they can work out co-operatively how they are going to plan their expenditures.