Mr. Speaker, new industry, unprecedented resource development and population growth are pushing our social infrastructure to the breaking point. Housing warrants our attention on an urgent basis. Our public and social housing system, Mr. Speaker, is built almost entirely on federal funding. Currently we owe $90 million in long-term housing loans to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. It costs us $13 million a year to finance this, Mr. Speaker, and just to give you an illustration on how dependent we are on CMHC, they contribute $12 million of this $13 million annual financing cost to us.
Another dependency that we have is almost $19 million a year in operation and maintenance funding that also
comes from CMHC. Add it all up and this year we will be receiving $33.2 million from CMHC. But that is a sunset program, Mr. Speaker. Under a 40-year deal that was signed with the corporation in the mid-1990s, this very critical and strategic investment in our infrastructure will dwindle, by 2038, to nothing. Yet the only plan that the NWT Housing Corporation has to restore it is, "to continue to lobby the federal government to restore funding to new public housing units and stop the reduction of O and M funding for existing units." I am quoting from the 2003-06 Business Plans tabled here last February.
Mr. Speaker, this is a remarkably lax and uninspiring strategy in the face of a very vital, but vanishing source of money. I wish the federal government had never backed out of its very critical investment in public housing across the country.
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We cannot trust our corporation's current strategy, simply to continue lobbying to restore that. In fact, Mr. Speaker, I think it would be naive and irresponsible to rest only on that strategy. I believe the solutions lie in innovations and thinking outside the box, Mr. Speaker. The solutions lie in new technology, energy and cost-saving designs, new funding partnerships and a new sense of pride and ownership in all our communities, about the value of public housing and the value of responsible homeownership. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.