Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would have to do a bit of research to get those details, but the idea is to maximize the funding we allocate to build the most number of housing units for seniors. These are specially designed housing units. In most cases, I understand they are in four-plex type clusters and there are specially designed to ensure they are as user friendly as possible for seniors. Thank you.

Thank you. Oral questions. Supplementary, Mr. Roland.

Mr. Arlooktoo.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My experience with the social housing units we now build has been in the previous year and in the current year, where we have built four-plexes in four communities. Although there is some difference in the details of the design, you do have a basic facility that is standard to all these buildings. How that compares to what has been done in the past, I do not know. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you. Oral questions. Supplementary, Mr. Roland.

Mr. Arlooktoo.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The short answer is yes. One of the things we do is continually take suggestions for improvements in the designs. I will find the correspondence on that concern and work with the Minister of Health and Social Services to see if we can address it. Thank you.

Thank you. I want to recognize in the gallery a long-time northerner, coauthor of the Northern Man book on Ernie Lyall. He is an educator, teacher and a resident of Iqaluit. Mr. Picco wants me to say this. He is also Ed's good friend, Nick Newbery.

--Applause

Oral questions. Mr. Krutko.

Minister of Municipal and Community Affairs, Ms. Thompson.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Under the Community Empowerment Strategy, we do community planning which involves the partners in the communities. It starts from the community. During community planning and visioning, there is also assessing of the community where the strengths may be and where training is needed. I would just like to mention that in 1997-98, RWED received approval for the Northern Employment Strategy, and $1.5 million was allocated to MACA for training. There has been quite a variety of training initiatives we have taken on. One of them is for community employees in areas such as social services; community works; computer software, completion of human resource assessment; human resource plans; hiring of local community empowerment coordinators, trainers and trainees; community and regional visioning and planning workshops. This is how we have been using that fund. If a specific community wants to train an individual to help them with their community empowerment within that community, I can work with my partners and see if we can have that individual trained. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you. Oral questions. Supplementary, Mr. Krutko.

Ms. Thompson.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. If there is a regional community empowerment team which consists of all superintendents in each region and if a community wants to train somebody, they can write up a proposal to this group. Then this group can give them some money to train this person and we can work with the community. One of the initiatives we have taken with community empowerment is community-based planning which helps communities with their vision, establishing their goals and setting priorities. If it is a priority of that community to train an individual, then that community should come up with a proposal to the regional superintendent's team, called the RICE teams. From there, we can deal with this issue. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Oral questions. Supplementary, Mr. Krutko.

Ms. Thompson.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The community can decide what they want to do with the Community Empowerment Fund. They can also hire a community empowerment person who can look after all the proposals and see what the community wants to present to the RICE teams at the regional level. We can hire staff in the community to deal with community empowerment. There is money to do that. I have to know which community would like that because I do not know which community he is talking about. We do have community empowerment coordinators in our regions. The community decides how they want to use that money. If they want to hire a community empowerment person, we can allow them to do that. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you. Oral questions. Supplementary, Mr. Krutko.