Thank you, Madam Speaker and Members. In Iqaluit, a long awaited alcohol and drug treatment centre is near completion. This is also great news. But there is no housing for the new treatment centre staff. Where will they live without housing? Will they be willing to apply for those critical new jobs?

It seems like our government believes that merely by getting out of staff housing, staff housing needs will look after themselves. Maybe that approach worked just fine in Yellowknife, Fort Smith and Hay River, places with a developed private housing market. But Baffin Island is not like Yellowknife. People applying for government jobs, even local people in communities, many of whom are probably already living in overcrowded public housing, and certainly not people coming up from the south or elsewhere in the NWT, will accept jobs in places like Hall Beach or Broughton Island on the basis they find accommodation once they get the jobs.

Our population in Baffin is growing, some communities by up to three per cent a year. Demands on government programs such as education and social services are growing because of the growing population. Apart from NWT Housing Corporation home ownership units and public housing, hardly any new houses have been built for years in these level II and III communities.

We have many new person years in this budget which was laid before us yesterday. I will be very concerned to find out whether the GNWT has a plan to provide housing for each new position in each community. Personnel and Public Works must have a strategy in place to meet staff housing for new staff needs at the same time as they implement in a careful manner, community by community, their program to sell staff housing to existing employees. If the Government of the Northwest Territories continues to pretend that selling off staff housing in level II and III communities, or waiting for the private sector to fill the gap, will somehow take care of staff housing requirements for our rapidly growing population, we'll have an even greater staff housing shortfall to catch up with each year.

Madam Speaker -- and I know the Minister of Economic Development will listen to this part of my statement with great attention -- there are development corporations and private companies willing to build housing units in these communities. I acknowledge that. And they are probably willing to sell them later on to government employees who want to buy them. But the reality, Madam Speaker, is that the private sector, these private companies, will not build on Baffin Island without government guaranteed leases. Why? They will not build, even on speculation, simply because no bank will finance such construction.

So, Madam Speaker, I say to Madam Premier and the Minister of Personnel, without exaggeration, I hope, in Baffin Island you have a staff housing crisis on your hands. For the sake of being able -- well, I'm only speaking...I know Baffin best, it may be true in other regions -- to deliver critical government programs, please deal with it. Thank you.

---Applause