Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I would like to be as positive as I can and state that, although this rental scale increase has been difficult for all of us, I was impressed with the consultation process the Minister initiated, the open way in which the corporation structured those consultations. I know it was expensive but I'd like to see, as much as possible, that process continued. There were many good recommendations that came out of that process, not just relating to the new rental scale but also relating to the matter of delivering housing programs. We all concentrated, in the special advisory committee and the corporation, on the rent scale and home ownership programs because those were the big priorities this year but there are a whole bunch of other issues that should be addressed.
As Ms. Mike was saying, there is a need to monitor the implementation of the rent scale to test out whether the assumptions that it was based on are actually going to work. I want to support continued consultation of the kind that was undertaken, even though I know it was expensive. I think it built up a lot of goodwill where there wasn't a lot when this started out.
One of the things that was strongly recommended in the Baffin consultations was that there be increased resources to the housing associations -- and I guess they're called local housing authorities now -- to take on the additional responsibilities of counselling people in home ownership, encouraging them to consider it, and helping them to prepare for the responsibilities, such as management of money, et cetera. I want to note that the corporation has delivered on the strong recommendation in that area. At least my community tells me there were increased resources provided to the local housing authority to use at their discretion in implementing the new rent scale and I would like to say that that has made a difficult job a little easier.
Secondly, my general impression is that the home ownership programs that have been put in place are working. I'd like to particularly mention the down payment assistance program, I was delighted to find out there is a high take-up in Baffin of that program. This is good for the region and for the corporation because, for a relatively small investment, the corporation gets home ownership units, compared to the costs of the other home ownership programs. It may be that the down payment assistance program is specially suited to high-income earners who are not desperately looking for alternatives to social housing, and that program seems to be particularly well-suited to Iqaluit where at least it's a community where there are options for people to build their own homes using private companies. I'm not sure that those same options are available in smaller communities, but at least in Iqaluit it seems to have been taken up by a number of people.
The Minister and his officials know that I was very upset about the arbitrary decision to declare single people ineligible to apply for home ownership programs that were in place this year for the round of applications for the coming construction season. I think the Minister and officials have agreed that a fairer way of approaching this problem would be not to exclude single persons from applying, but rather to say they can apply; however, priority will be given to families, especially families with children. Any of the single people I've talked to who wanted to apply felt that was quite a reasonable thing, to give higher priority to people with families and children, but they were very insulted when they weren't even allowed to apply. I'm sure the Minister knows that a single person in the Northwest Territories, especially a long-term resident, especially an aboriginal person, is not really a single person. They have an extended family, they're part of an extended family network and it's very unlikely that they'll live alone in a home ownership unit if they get it. Many of the people who applied this year from my riding were Inuit, were people who had their own children or responsibilities for their extended family, and they were in that category where, if they had been able to apply for the program and get houses through the home ownership programs, they would have benefitted their whole extended family.
I will be asking at the appropriate time, I believe the Minister has reconsidered that approach for the coming year and I think that will be an improvement.
I would also like to say that I think the jury is still out on just how this rental scale will work. I want to see how it affects the arrears in my community. The housing authority in Iqaluit has worked very hard on getting the arrears down. I hope that the trend will not be that the arrears will start to build up again when we implement the new rent scale.
Secondly, Mr. Chairman, I've began to have some doubts about this 30 per cent rule, the 30 per cent of gross household income. The reason I have doubts about that, Mr. Chairman, about whether it's really going to allow people enough money to survive on is that if we turn to the private sector and look at the rules that banks follow when assessing what is reasonable for a family to pay towards a mortgage for a house, my understanding is that banks will not risk giving mortgages to households where as much as 30 per cent of the gross income has to be put towards the mortgage. The rule in the real world out there is that a bank won't risk giving someone a mortgage with that high of a proportion of the household income dedicated to the household expenses. The banks think that people who are paying that much towards the costs of housing aren't going to make it.
I think we may have to ask ourselves whether this is realistic, especially in the Northwest Territories, to take that big a chunk of household incomes out of the family and still expect them to buy food, Pampers, maintain a subsistence hunting lifestyle, et cetera. This is one area that I think we should closely monitor as we're assessing the impact of the new rent scale. Is it realistic? I know CMHC may say this is what you have to do, but we have to ask ourselves is it going to work. If it's not going to work and we start to find that we have to evict people because they can't afford to pay their rent, then we have real horrendous social problems.
As Ms. Mike said, for one thing, where do these people go if they're evicted? For another thing, do you penalize 80 per cent or 60 per cent of a household if 40 per cent or 20 per cent of the household refused to pay rent according to their share of the income? Do you penalize an elder who doesn't have to pay rent now because one or more of their children refuse to pay rent? Evict the elder along with the kids because a couple of kids didn't pay rent. I hope we don't have to deal with a lot of these questions, but if we have to start dealing with a lot of these questions maybe we should review whether 30 per cent is realistic.
Mr. Chairman, one other general comment in closing, and I'll have a few questions when we get into the detail. The Housing Corporation is changing radically. It's taking on staff housing; it's no longer building houses; it's supporting people in home ownership; it's putting more responsibilities on communities, appropriately, to manage and maintain housing and implement the new rental schemes and the new home ownership programs. Because the corporation is changing so fundamentally, I'd like to see a new corporate strategy and corporate plan, new corporate goals and objectives, and I think that this work is being done by the corporation. I understand that there's a lot of rethinking of its goals and objectives and its structure. I think it's important for this Assembly to be made aware of the changes that are being discussed internally. They should be presented to us, we should have an opportunity to review them and comment on them. I hope that in the life of this government, that will happen. I hope we'll have a chance to get the benefit of seeing the work that I know the corporation is doing so the people of the Northwest Territories can, through us, assess what's happening and make comments on what's happening and make sure it's going to work.
So I'm going to be asking about the new corporation vision of the Housing Corporation and how this Assembly is going to find out about the work that's being done by the Minister and by his staff on retooling for the 1990s and beyond. Those are my general comments, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.