Yes, Madam Chair. We are looking at this as a territorial number. We are trying to use the selling off of public housing initiative that we do have for tenants in those units to purchase the units so they can become homeowners. The problem we have in a lot of communities is we don't have market housing. We're trying to get people to become homeowners who are in the high bracket of income, especially with the rent scales. We're trying to work with those clients to get them into homeownership. If they want to acquire the unit that

they're in, we are doing appraisals on different units in the communities so there is an appraised price for individuals who are interested and then, from there, we can either work them in through the EDAP or IHP for them to take ownership by going through the bank or whatnot to finance it. That's where we're going.

Thank you, Mr. Krutko. Next on the list I have Ms. Lee.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I have a lot of comments to make with respect to this department. I'd like to first start off with just general comments. From where I sit, there is a lack of cooperation and communication with the Minister and committee, at least with respect to one issue. That has to do with the market housing initiative. Madam Chair, I have to tell you that it has been a completely frustrating exercise and I need to say that the fact that the Members on this side are very critical about one issue is not to say that we consider the whole department a failure. We don't use those words very lightly. We mean that when we say that we are very unhappy with the way the market housing initiative was designed and implemented. I'm sure the Minister has done a lot of good work in other things and I know that the department has a lot more on their books than the market housing initiative. But I tell you, Madam Chair, the committee has been communicating with the department and the Minister over and over and over. In detailed letters we've asked for briefings, we've made so many suggestions. Talk about a Minister with cotton balls in his ears. I am not impressed. I have to tell you that I worked with the Minister on this side. He was always very passionate about the responsibility of Ministers to respond and listen to Members. For many areas, he's good at that. For some reason, he is completely unresponsive to this issue and I don't know why that is.

Madam Chair, the corporation is responsible for over $100 million. This is a $2 million project. In the grand scheme of things, it's not the biggest deal. The only thing the Members on this side and the Social Programs committee have been asking is, let's have some discussion about this. We had this right from the beginning. When Mr. McLeod brought this to the Social Programs committee, we knew from the get-go that this was introducing something totally new. The department's overview said that. The goal was to introduce a housing market in non-market communities. I mean, that is an audacious and ambitious plan. It was fraught with possible problems. We asked questions like, are you sure the communities are ready? What kind of legwork have you done? How do you know people want to buy these houses? We were assured, I can tell you, I can remember it like yesterday, officials whose names I'm not going to mention looked right at us and said yes, we're ready, we've talked to them, we'll do the legwork, we'll talk to LHOs and LHOs are going to go out there and they're going to do their promotion and we're going to make this work. It has to work. We can't have teachers and we can't have nurses if we don't do this. Please, we have to waive the business incentive policy. Just give us the benefit of the doubt. We just have to do it and if you say no to this, you're stopping progress, you're stopping history, you're going to make these professional people homeless.

We let this go and as early as October we wrote a letter to the Minister calling this project a total boondoggle. We needed more information. We were calling for an independent review back then, but we got to thinking that when they had only five units out of 22 being occupied at that time, we knew this was going to be a problem. We asked for post-mortem back in October, in November, in December, in January. We couldn't get one iota of information and now we're told we really don't care what the Social Programs committee thinks because we're going to do this anyway. We really don't care about the fact that we have completely failed in our exercise. We don't even think that we need to review to see what went wrong.

You know what? I take my job here more seriously than to just say it's just $2 million, go and see what you can do with it. If you want to buy 22 mobile homes, that's great. The first 22 didn't work out. Well, that's great. We will give you another $2 million and see how successful you get. The reason we got at the end of January in the last draft main briefing as to why they could not give us a post-mortem was that they were still waiting from a response from the Department of Health and Social Services and Justice and, I guess, Education about how many teachers they are expecting to have in communities who might be interested in this. They were relying on the deputy minister's letter as a guarantee. That was as far as they were going to get in writing that would assure them these units were going to be taken.

I just don't think that's enough. I have to say, Madam Chair, when I am totally this critical about an initiative, it's not being critical about the Minister or officials personally. I understand that they are all professionals and they spend a lot of time doing their work, but surely I need to be able to be critical about an initiative that the government has brought forward that is completely new. It's completely innovative and it's part of a 10-year plan that was completely derailed in the first year. Apparently, we don't have any say on this side of the table to say maybe that wasn't such a great idea. Maybe it wasn't such a great idea that you are lifting the housing market. Maybe we should think how we could spend that $2.2 million better. The Members suggested we could build multi-plex units. We have Members who suggested mobile homes are not a good thing for social housing, for example. The Minister even said in one of our hearings, give us money, we'll do it, if it doesn't work, we will just use it as social housing.

I don't know. Maybe because the Housing Corporation only gets half of their money from the GNWT, maybe they shouldn't even come before us. If we aren't going to have any say on how the new initiatives work and how they should be rolled out, then why do we get asked? Why are we wasting our time?

Anyway, I have to tell you, talk about a Minister who is completely defending the department's position, not listening to Members, not working with the committee. I can tell you I am sorely disappointed with the way the Minister has responded to this issue. I am being critical of this initiative, not of the person or anything. It's just I am not impressed with this. I am only asking the Minister to open up and listen to what we have been saying and we have been saying it for six months at least. Will the Minister change his mind about this? Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Lee. Mr. Krutko.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I would just like to inform the House that I have been cooperating with

the committee. I have shared all the information I have had access to. We have done briefings with the committee. I kept you up to date on where those units sat. Also, with regard to our implementation report on phase one, we could not deliver it because we did not conclude the construction and the complete phase of the project until the middle of November.

With regard to the time that was expected, I made it clear to the committee, at the time, that I would be reporting back after the phase two evaluation was presented to Cabinet. Once that was approved, I presented it to committee.

Also, I have been working with Members to try to get to the bottom of a lot of these problems. We are expecting to do a project that, in most cases, because you are dealing with logistics and isolated communities, housing projects usually take a year. We did something in less than six-and-a-half months. The majority of those units weren't ready for occupancy until almost October or November. In this case, a lot of people in those communities who were asking for these units found other accommodation.

We are working with those communities. We have put out calls to communities to ensure that we are open to other interested parties. The majority of the communities that we have these units in right now have requested, either through homeownership or working with the professions who are coming to communities, to have an opportunity to acquire these units. When they were there prior to this, they had to leave because there was no accommodation. We are seeing that.

We are also working closer with the departments to ensure that that information is out there. The bottom line is you are dealing with a challenge where you can't just drive up to a subdivision and pick which unit you want. You have all these logistical problems of getting these into communities. You have land development problems, transportation problems and ensuring that it is affordable.

I would just like to elaborate on the fact that now we are in the process of talking with the communities. We have interest in almost every community to purchase these units, either through the private sector or other departments like RWED or MACA. If anything, the whole idea is to develop a market in communities where there never was a market. Now people have an option and they didn't have that before. In most cases, communities such as Norman Wells and also Rae-Edzo and other communities, we are developing capacity in those communities, so we can accommodate professions who are looking at a health board for the Sahtu region. Where are they going to go?

Also with regard to the Tlicho agreement, they have to build capacity. One of the challenges we face is the need to be able to develop a market which isn't there right now. We have been working with those different organizations such as the Sahtu health board because they are the ones who are requesting more units in those communities.

It's important that we don't lose sight that there are other professions in our communities who now have an option that was never there before. I don't think we can exclude the idea that now we have 66 beds in communities that we didn't have a year ago.

A concern that I have is I have been open with the Members and I have been responding to any information requested by the committee. The report was done, the evaluation was done and we admit there have been mistakes, but trying to do a project which takes a year in six-and-a-half months, if anything we should be praising the department for making that go. I guess it was wishful thinking to deliver those before September 1st, but that didn't happen. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Krutko. Next on my list I have Mr. McLeod.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I just have a few general comments. I like the idea of the EDAP program. It allows people to get into units a lot younger than they would normally in the rest of Canada. The old HAP units that they used to have, everything was supplied and they were supposed to supply the labour. Then they started applying for funding, so it ended up that they didn't have any money being put into it and the corporation isn't recovering any money out of that. With the EDAP program, they seem to be recovering some of the money that they are getting.

We made a comment before about the maintenance being poor with some of these units and the mould and everything. Having worked in maintenance, I sort of take offence to that. There is still a soft spot for all the maintenance boys who used to crawl around and thaw out frozen sewage tanks. A lot of these houses were hard to maintain because they were so flippin' old. One particular set of units we tried renovating, then and we started taking them apart and we found out it was the third renovation they were going through. I believe there were nine of them written off in Aklavik and they are being replaced.

I applaud the corporation for trying to make a go to supply market housing for people who are coming into the communities. I don't know if it should be in the corporation mandate or in the respective employers such as Health and Social Services or Education for teachers. I do applaud you for trying to fill a need, but I don't think that should be your mandate.

I made a statement the other day, saying I believe housing should stick to its original mandate to provide public and affordable housing. I really like the EDAP program. You still will recover some money out of it. The potential owners will still put a lot of their own money into it. They will have to pay for it.

We used to have an old program called the R and R program. I don't know if you are familiar with that. It was the Rural and Remote Program. There was this one particular lady in Aklavik who paid faithfully on her mortgage for 25 years, but halfway through the 25 years, a new program came out where everything was supplied. So we tried to get her mortgage forgiven because so many loans were being forgiven; we thought it could work for her, but it didn't. She ended up paying quite a bit of money.

With the trailers, you get the trailers from down south. I realize stick-built would be a bit more expensive going into the communities and trying to put in market housing, but they would provide contracts for local contractors and put some of the local people to work, so the money would stay here.

Apartments or townhouses might be a better idea where you have central heating, central water, central sewage, especially in some of the smaller communities.

Those are all the comments I have for now, Madam Chair. Thanks a lot.

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Mr. Krutko.

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.

Thank you, Mr. Krutko. Anything further, Mr. McLeod? Mr. Ramsay.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Sorry, sorry. I didn't realize that Mr. McLeod had anything further to say. Mr. McLeod, you have the floor.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I apologize for that. One other comment I would like to make and again it's regarding maintenance and everything that I have seen and I find that maintenance is being cut. It seems like administration is going up. It should be the opposite way around, because they are having to maintain older units. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Mr. Krutko.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, as I mentioned earlier, we are putting a major focus on maintenance. We are putting $8.5 million into that area. We are looking at changing the structure of the organization and, because of that, we are spending more time with the local housing authorities or regional offices to give them more tools to be able to deliver the programs and take the decision-making process closer to the communities and closer to the region and giving them more resources. By taking on the responsibilities, we are allowing them to keep a larger portion of those revenues that they have taken through collections on mortgages. That way, we can give them more resources.

Because of the major concerns we have seen, we have put an influx into homeownership programs and emergency repair programs. It's important that we realize that, looking at our needs survey, those are the majority of the needs that we are seeing. Because of the reports that have been concluded, that is the direction we are taking. We are trying to meet some of the core needs in a lot of our communities. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Krutko. Next on the list for general comments I have Mr. Villeneuve.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I would just like to move that we report progress.

Thank you, Mr. Villeneuve. The motion is in order. It's not debatable. All those in favour of the motion? All those opposed? The motion is carried. Thank you, committee. Thank you, Mr. Krutko, Mr. Anderson, Mr. Koe. I will now rise and report progress.

Can I have the report of Committee of the Whole? Mrs. Groenewegen.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, your committee has been considering Bill 19, Appropriation Act, 2005-2006, and Committee Report 11-15(3), and would like to report progress with one motion being adopted. Mr. Speaker, I move that the report of Committee of the Whole be concurred with. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. Do we have a seconder? The honourable Member for Mackenzie Delta, Mr. Krutko. There is a motion on the floor. The motion is order. All those in favour? All those opposed? The motion is carried.

---Carried

Item 21, third reading of bills. Mr. Clerk, orders of the day.

Thank you, Mr. Clerk. Accordingly, this House stands adjourned until Wednesday, March 2, 2005, at 1:30 p.m.

---ADJOURNMENT

The House adjourned at 7:43 p.m.