Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I met with the Hon. Elmer MacKay last week in Ottawa, on the 17th and 18th of June, and when meeting with him I wanted to make sure that he understood the uniqueness of our housing problems in the Northwest Territories. I made sure he understood that, in the Territories, we are basically a first generation of people coming off the land. We have a high demand for housing. We do not have an old stock of housing to fix, like the southern provinces do. We are basically talking about getting people out of igloos and tents, and into housing.
I think he understands that now, and he also understands that the birth rate in the Northwest Territories is twice the national average.
Many of our communities also depend highly on housing for jobs. I told the Minister that in the past, with the fur industry, our people did contribute to the community. They did have some way to generate money, and a lot of our young people now look forward to the summer to work on construction jobs in the housing field. If you take that hope away from them, they are basically left without any hope of gaining any meaningful employment. So I stressed that point. I also stressed, that in turn, it would basically drive up the social and suicidal problems that we have, because people would not have any hope of gaining employment from new housing construction.
I also pointed out the problems we are having with health, because of lack of adequate and suitable housing. In the Northwest Territories, we had over 50 cases of tuberculosis occurring since 1988.
Approximately 50 to 55 per cent of our public housing clients are also on social services, which makes a difference from the South. Our government supplies social housing, and the biggest part of our clientele is aboriginal people, so they have a certain commitment to supply housing to aboriginal people.
I also made it clear to the Minister that the territorial government's highest priority is housing. We spend eight per cent of our budget on housing. There is no other province in Canada that spends close to that of their provincial budgets. The highest any province spends is one per cent. Some do not spend any of their own money on housing.
I made it clear that we are committed to try to solve our housing problems; that we do not continually expect to go back to the pot for more money. We would make commitments to cut costs and cut increased expenses by redesigning our units and getting a better bang for our buck, getting people to kick in more for the cost of their own housing, and also look at the programs. I felt, when I came away from the meeting, that he understood our problems, and he knows that we have unique problems in the Northwest Territories.
I will be going again on Sunday to the Ministers' meeting in Toronto to discuss the same things again. All the provincial governments' Ministers of Housing will be there, as well as Elmer MacKay, Minister of Housing for the federal government. So I am going to pursue the issue more at that time. We are also speaking to and writing to the Minister of Indian Affairs,
Mr. Siddon; the Minister of Finance, Mr. Mazankowski; as well as Joe Clark, the Minister of Constitutional Development. It is an ongoing thing. There should be some finality to this in July or August because the year is getting late.
What we are trying to do is at least get our funding back to the 1991-92 level of funding that was in place at that time. I also talked to the Minister about our share of the federal pie; that no way could we accept any reduction in that share. Right now, we enjoy 6.44 per cent of the federal social housing budget, and we have to continue to enjoy that if not increase it, because of our unique circumstances.
That is basically where things stand right now, and, as things develop, I would be happy to let Members know as soon as possible. Thank you.