Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, today I want to talk about concerns I have with the NWT Housing Corporation. It has recently occurred to me that there are so many unresolved questions and issues about the functioning of this corporation/department, that we need to turn some serious attention to its operations. Today, I will just provide a broad overview of the issues, as I see them. I don't have a lot of detail to offer today, but I have research
looking into specific questions for me, and I will also have questions for the Minister at some point in this House.
We vote approximately $30 million per year for the operations of the NWT Housing Corporation. Do these dollars actually go to address what we constantly refer to as the critical shortage of suitable housing in the North, or do they go to a myriad of other activities, most of which, I maintain, are questionable at best and abysmal failures at worst?
How much of our financial resources that we commit to the NWT Housing Corporation go to a bloated, overstaffed headquarters? Why do we need so many people in headquarters? Why doesn't the number of positions in headquarters go down when the corporation decides to contract functions out? How many initiatives are undertaken by the Housing Corporation without proper budgets associated with them? For example, the Novel project. Were there funds budgeted for travel, consultation, consultants, so that the committee with the responsibility of the Housing Corporation could have input, or is this initiative forging ahead on an ad hoc basis?
We hear that the mandate of the Housing Corporation is changing. What is it changing to? Who is setting the priorities and direction for these changes? What about the housing policies and the rent scale? Why have we never been able to address the hardship that is caused when there are overcrowded housing situations in communities, and employed family members can't live in a public housing unit with a client without their rent changing to the point of making it impossible for the tenant to pay their rent even on a temporary basis? Yet, we can have people performing illegal activities at a housing unit selling drugs and bootlegging alcohol for which there is no declared income. We are paying their rent.