Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I, too, rise in support of this motion and just wanted to point out that a lot of the issues that I face as an MLA, about 80 percent of it is housing. I travel to the communities and that's one of the first things that people point out to me, is that we have to keep addressing our needs. So that's what I've been trying to do. I've been urging, I've been
working with the Minister responsible for the Housing Corporation to try to find solutions in the Nahendeh.
In my Member's statement today I spoke about single housing. That's one of the biggest needs that's coming up right now. We don't specifically speak to it in the motion, Mr. Speaker, but that's one of the growing needs that's happening already.
But in terms of the motion; yes, the people do want social housing. I don't know how or when or why our government is moving away from social housing, Mr. Speaker. In fact, I don't know when they're changing the mandate or who gave them the authority to change their mandate. I think we give them the mandate and I think the people give the government a mandate. People still want social housing. In terms of that, once again I'd like to urge government to take the cotton balls out of their ears and say hey, we want social housing. Let's move in that direction again.
There are people out there who want to build houses, they need some help, they want assistance in building their houses. They don't want people to do it for them. But we don't have a program for that anymore. It used to be called the HAP program, and people were proud to be building their own homes. But we're not allowing that to happen anymore, Mr. Speaker. They think it should, and I think it should, and I believe our government should make it happen that way.
As well, in terms of disabled housing, there's a little bit of mixture because it is part of Health and Social Services' responsibility to help the disabled modify their houses, as well as the Housing Corporation does have a bit of a program. So there has to be better coordination and efforts in making our houses more disabled friendly.
But to confuse the people out there by sending them from one department to another department, just doesn't work. It just frustrates people, Mr. Speaker. I'd like to see a more coordinated effort or perhaps another transfer of responsibilities and say, okay, one guy will handle this segment.
Just with that, Mr. Speaker, I think that we have a whole new pot of money set aside in the federal government that was announced yesterday. It's still not clear, but I think that our Minister should go to Ottawa and not come back until he has answers for us.
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I think the Minister should go to Ottawa and not come back until he's got us positive answers to social housing.
---Laughter
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With that, Mr. Speaker, I once again speak in favour of this motion. It's, indeed, my way of getting the government to listen to us to bring housing more in the forefront to this Assembly and the NWT as a whole. Mahsi cho.
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