Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just with regard to the Member's question, I think it's important that we start getting communities more involved in the program side of housing. I think I mentioned earlier that one of the ways we're doing that is we're working out universal partnership agreements with bands or Metis locals to hire people to explain the programs and be the contact person in that community to do the follow-up with the different regional staff. I know my office is always open to Members. If you do have concerns from your constituency or your ridings on a particular individual or client that we're working with, I'm more than willing to assist you by making the headquarters staff aware and also working with people in the regional operations to make them aware these issues are out there and for them to act on it.
I think, if anything, if we can improve the communication between the Housing Corporation and our tenants and people in our communities. That's going to go a long way to ensuring the delivery of our programs and services that we have to simplify, but also make it user friendly. I know for a fact that was one of the issues I've heard throughout my visits over the summer in a lot of communities. It seemed like people came to their communities, they took applications, they took a look at your house, they left and you don't see them for eight months. I think, if anything, we have to have better follow-up. I think from that I've basically instructed the department to start making use of these contractual agreements we have to improve the capacity of not only ourselves as an organization, but improve the involvement of the communities, local
housing authorities, to start taking more ownership of the program side of these things than simply being involved in the operations and maintenance of the community housing stock.
With regard to the local housing authorities, I know the biggest challenge they face is in the area of collections. But we have been definitely improving in that area and most communities are well in excess of 87 to 90 percent collections. I think that shows you that the communities are being more involved and working with our clients. I think that we do have to work out a system that we know people in order to...You mentioned the question of what it takes for someone to apply for EDAP. I think in Yellowknife, for instance, it's well in excess of $78,000. I think a lot of people in communities don't earn that type of salary and we have to look at our programs to ensure we don't discriminate on the basis of income. We have to ensure the program is universal, but we also have to have allowance that people should not be excluded simply on the amount of income they generate. We also have to realize we have to look at ways of how to spread out a person's mortgage who wants to go for EDAP. Like I mentioned, even by extending it for another five years could be a way these people could find it affordable. Instead of going 20 years, go 25 years. There's the possibility to go 30. I think those are the types of things we have to look at in regard to reviewing the mandate of the corporation and also in developing a Northern Strategy.
I think one of the challenges we're facing, not only here in the North but across Canada, is why is it that First Nations people make up the majority of people in public housing in Canada. I think that's a question we have to look at. Social housing is an issue, but how do you make that transition of three generations of people who have lived in social housing or public housing? We have to break that barrier. For some reason we're not seeing that transition.
I've been working with Billy Erasmus with AFN and we've also heard about an aboriginal housing strategy and that's one of the issues they're trying to face also. They have the same problems in the reserves in southern Canada and other places with respect to the whole area of housing.
Just with regard to an issue you raised about the maintenance programs we have. The program we use with regard to the maintenance management operations system, we have held workshops. There have been two in the last few weeks, one in the southern part of the territory in Hay River and one in Inuvik for people in the Sahtu and Beaufort-Delta region. We went over the maintenance program. One of the areas that I mentioned that we as the corporation have identified, we've put more dollars into the budget to look at the minor and major repairs we need on a lot of our stock, but also ensuring we have a good maintenance program so we have ongoing maintenance. You don't just do maintenance one year and then forget it for two or three and then realize you have a bigger problem than you did when you first started. The key is ongoing maintenance. You have to continue to keep up with your maintenance program. Again, in the budget, like I mentioned, there's $5.3 million just to deal with public housing and to start making those improvements on our housing stock, but also to try to extend the life of those programs.
Another issue that you touched on was the whole area of social housing and the declining dollars with regard to those social dollars, which will basically decline to zero in 2038. The biggest challenge we have there are most of the social housing programs, the 2,300 units we have, a large portion of this money, especially on the operations side, the O and M to operate these units, come out of that $30 million. So how do we replenish those dollars back into our system? One of the ways we're looking at is selling off our housing units, to take those O and M dollars out of those units that we sell and put them back into these multi-plex units that we're looking at building, which are more economically efficient, and also cheaper to build.
I think the other area that we're having a challenge with is the whole area of land development; just trying to find assessable land to build. As I mentioned, we need 188 units. Where do you put them in a lot of these communities, because they do not presently have land available.