Mr. Chairman, let me try again to see if the Member can understand. There was a lack of available housing in the community. The school was only able to staff six out of seven teaching positions. There was a crisis in the sense that there was not enough housing in the community to be able to fully staff the school, unless they bumped somebody in a community out of a house, which they were not willing to do. This project was undertaken on an emergency basis. The crisis was staff who required housing. This housing unit is not just for teachers, or just for anyone else. It is community housing. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The repairs, or the renovation, from my understanding, this surplus must have taken place after April 1st, so in fact, the school year is almost done in that community. If the corporation knew that this situation occurred, would it not have been more prudent to budget in the normal manner and have it come forward in that sense? You are saying this is an emergency to deal with it. The renovations, have they occurred or are they going to occur? Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, the renovations to this building were completed in 2001 by the Housing Corporation using their own money. The final settlement on the billings and so on came after March 31, 2002. Now, what is happening is the GNWT has to reimburse the Housing Corporation for the money they had spent last year. We did not get the billing in time to be able to do it within the regular appropriation.

Just a little more clarification on this. This project, this urgency, this emergent need in the community was an emergent need last year. It went through last year's business plans and it just ended up taking a long time to bill, to finish billing, or it ran over by $226,000, so this is only a portion of the project, correct?

No, Mr. Chairman, this is the full project. What happened is the Housing Corporation built it with their own funding. Once the final bills were tallied up, the GNWT has to reimburse the Housing Corporation for the money they spent on this. Thank you.

I guess I do not understand why the GNWT has to reimburse the Housing Corporation for the entire cost of the project that was planned within the normal means and just ended up being completed a little late. Is this an accounting exercise? It sounds strange to me. It is the first one I have seen. We do not do this on a regular basis. I have to imagine that bills come in late for buildings that we construct all the time. We do have a budget process, we have a capital planning process, and all of a sudden this one is built a little late and the GNWT is reimbursing the Housing Corporation for it? It does not make sense to me.

Mr. Chairman, this was not a project that was done through the normal means, as Mr. Bell referred to. This is a project that was built on an emergency basis because of a crisis with the inability to hire and house all of the staff.

Essentially, does the government do this all of the time? Well, the government provides the Housing Corporation with a good piece of their money. What we are doing here is we are providing the Housing Corporation after the fact with money. We are reimbursing them for their costs. Thank you.

Well, the Housing Corporation has a significant budget, and it would seem to me, if they had this urgency, this emergent need come up, they could shuffle and delay some project in order to put this one in when we are only talking about $226,000 on quite a significant budget.

A few things seem strange about this. I think we have serious housing shortages in many of the communities and that stops us from being able to hire professionals in those communities. I am just wondering why this one was singled out. I would think that in quite a few communities, we have a hard time and do not have the proper staff housing for teachers. I have heard Members up and down this side of the House talk about it for years. For this to come outside of the business planning process seems strange to me. It does not seem to be of an emergent nature that we do not routinely see in other communities.

Mr. Chairman, first of all, to clarify that the Housing Corporation's mandate and budget is for public housing and there are some very, very tight limitations in terms of what kind of housing they can build. Paulatuk is a community in which there is, first of all, not much housing available. Second, the community was unable to fully staff their school without additional housing.

To build housing for staff is beyond the mandate of the Housing Corporation. The only way to get additional housing into the community -- there was no other alternative except to move someone else out of their house -- was to have more housing built. The Housing Corporation had to go beyond their mandate, use money in 2001-2002 to do it, and now the government is reimbursing them for the cost they had to bear, which was outside of their mandate in order to resolve the problem with staffing the school.

There are other communities that probably have housing concerns too, but Paulatuk is a much more extreme case than anywhere else. Thank you.

Maybe I am way off base here, but it seems to me it would have made sense to approach ECE and say, can you find $220,000 for us in Education's budget to do this, and then have ECE transfer the money to the Housing Corporation.

Mr. Chairman, Education does not have a mandate to provide housing for staff. We do not have a staff housing policy. We do not have a provision for Education to be able to spend money in that way. The appropriate way is to have the government reimburse the Housing Corporation for the money they spent from their public housing program. Thank you.

Well, Education does not have a mandate to do this. The Housing Corporation did not have a mandate to do it. It amazingly got done. It is strange. Good government, the Minister is suggesting. Yes, I agree that we need to take care of urgent staffing needs in communities, but this has to fit somewhere. Someone has to have the mandate to do this kind of thing. I guess that is something that we should get clarified. It seems amazing that no one has a mandate to do it and yet we did it. Thank you.