Thank you, Madam Chair. I will be supporting this motion. I believe that, especially for the level 11 and III communities, we have to find another avenue of accessing revenue, especially for the large number of houses that are needed, especially in the smaller communities.
I think that we have to find an alternative to the problem that we are seeing with the Housing Corporation being cut over the years; by six per cent this year, we got cut by $10 million through that program out of Ottawa just recently.
In my riding, I have to go into communities where people have houses which are run down which do not have running water and do not have toilets -- they still have honey buckets
-- and that's the life of most of the people in my riding who have to live in these types of units because they do not have the availability to access resources through the ACCESS program. They are limited in most resources.
We have something like 3,000 houses needed because of the problem we have in housing in the North, and now we finally have a mechanism where the government is going to put in a five-to-one ratio, where, for every $5 we get, we put $1 in. I mean, you can't ask for a better deal than that, where we are not taking the complete risk, and we should seriously consider this opportunity for us to benefit those communities that do not have access to banking and those institutions.
Sure, Mr. Picco can say, well, these banks will go in, out and everywhere else. I've been talking to the banks myself. I have asked them if they could drive two hours from Inuvik to McPherson twice a month and have someone come in to help people with their pensions, help them out with their convenience cards and set up things like that. They can't do it and they won't do it. It's not economically viable for them to do it and they are not going to do it. So, no offence to Mr. Picco's comments, but it doesn't work in my region.
I think we have to find a mechanism to do that, and I see these resources being used for that, so I will be supporting the motion.