Thank you, Madam Chair. I would like to thank Mr. McLeod for his comments and also for his expertise in this area. In the areas he touched on, no offence to Mr. McLeod, but with regard to the maintenance improvement programs, we realize there has been very little dollars put into this area. Because they had to apply year by year, some years they got it, some years they didn't. Now because we put such an influx of dollars into the major/minor repair programs, now all communities will be able to access it and deal with the challenges you mentioned of having a lot of old units we have acquired through the federal CMHC program and social housing. We are dealing with facilities that go back 30 or 40 years, like you said. Then you talk about Weber houses, HAP, EDAP and the remote program. It has devolved over time, yet those units are still in those communities and they still are requiring our assistance to keep them at a certain standard or continue to put the band-aid on top of another band-aid. You end up doing repair program after repair program after repair program and not really doing the job that's necessary.

From where we are going, we realize now that these units are almost at the end of their life and we have to look at possibly taking down the units. You mentioned condominiums. One thing we realize, as a corporation, because there is such a demand on social and public housing, we have to build multi-plex units just to try to keep up with today's demand.

With regard to the market housing initiative, we are working in partnership with the private sector to look at the ideas of condominiums or multi-plex structures. Like you mentioned, having a central heating system and a central boiler system brings down the cost of operating those units. That's what we are doing in phase two. We want to ensure we are open to these new ideas, but also developing a business around it to partner up with the private sector and work with the communities to ensure that we are able to meet the goal that was set.

With regard to the mandate of this initiative of market housing, the mandate was given to the corporation from the Department of Finance, because of the whole concern that was raised during the 14th Assembly. We had a lot of programs directed at communities. What we were seeing is we were not seeing people able to fulfil those commitments under those programs that this government put forward, where communities just could not deliver these programs that were universal across the NWT. It's important that we be open minded on how we take this approach. We are working in partnership with these other partners.

The program you touched on, that is something we have to continue to develop, is the whole idea of sweat equity. We used to have the old HAP units where people went out of their way, got their logs, brought them in and then we gave them the materials to complete it, such as SHAG and other programs. I think those types of programs are still needed, where people want to have that independence and build their own home. Then they can say, at the end of the day, you aren't tied to a bank, you aren't tied to a mortgage. It's yours. You built it and put sweat equity into it and you have total control of it. What we are seeing in our communities is people who have always had that independency find it very hard to go into social housing and also public housing. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.