Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Last week in the House, I asked the Minister of Housing what the outstanding arrears are owed to the Housing Corporation through the local housing authorities. He took my question as notice, so I'm going to continue on with my questioning today on that subject.
The Minister reported that the amount was over $5 million, so I would assume from that that from time to time, people living in public housing have difficulty paying their rent. I think we could also assume that some tenants in public housing have personal problems which preclude them from paying their rent, and those problems could be any number of things.
Recently, a situation in Hay River arose where a tenant in public housing had to be evicted from their unit through the courts. The point was that the tenant ended up having to be accommodated in other housing in Hay River at the expense of the Department of Social Services. Is there anything that can be done within the department to assist people in paying their rent so that they don't lose their rental unit because of personal problems? Is there some initiative that can be taken to deal with that, prior to it coming to the housing authorities having to take legal action to evict tenants? I want to add one footnote on there, that the other side of that is that we do have a $5 million debt and the people in the housing authorities are doing their jobs in trying to collect those rental arrears, I understand that. But is there anything that can be done before it gets to that adversarial and court-type eviction? Thank you.