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.