Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, as the Member mentioned, there are a lot of challenges we are facing, especially in the Sahtu communities. I think, as a government, we have to ensure that we are able to meet the challenge, but I think that one of the more important things is that we have to start to either put more dollars into the building of housing or else ensuring that we have a strategy in place. Right now, we are developing a northern housing strategy in conjunction with the Northern Strategy. But in order to meet the demands, like I mentioned, we need 188 houses on the ground just to bring our percentages down to 30 percent. There was a motion passed in this House. They want us to do that by year 2007. That is two years from now. With regard to that motion, we have to find ways of dealing with it. Again, the concern is that we cannot continue to blame the federal government for getting out of social housing and other things. I think we also have to realize that we have a lot of communities. The Sahtu is one of those areas where we have percentages well in excess of 30 percent. I will just mention the Member's communities: Colville Lake, 76 percent; Deline, 42 percent; Fort Good Hope, 37 percent; and, Tulita, 36 percent. Again, just by those percentages alone, we realize how big the crisis is. Just to meet the demands of the community of Colville Lake, we have to put 15 units in there just to bring down the core need of 76 percent to 30 percent, almost doubling the houses that are presently in Colville Lake. So we are looking at 15 units that we are going to have to deliver just to meet that demand in the small community of Colville Lake. Again, there is a cost to that.

The same thing is with regard to Fort Good Hope. In Fort Good Hope, we have 168 houses. Out of that, 62 of those houses have some core need. So almost one-third of the housing in Fort Good Hope have something wrong with them. In just meeting the core need of people to get houses, again, we need some...Fort Good Hope, we are looking at 37 percent of those people are in core need. Again, it is a major challenge just to bring Fort Good Hope down to a certain level. We need something like 12 houses right away. We are, through the budgetary process and also looking at our surveys that were done, looking at putting almost $5 million into the Sahtu this year.

With regard to housing, we are looking at almost $1.3 million for independent housing so individuals can own their own homes through that program. Again, when you talk about maintenance programs and trying to bring our units up to a certain level, during my tour over the summer, I traveled from the Beaufort Sea down to the Deh Cho. One thing that I saw, which is pretty obvious, is that we have a lot of units that have deteriorated over time. You have a lot of old public housing in a lot of these communities that have had almost 30 or 40 years of life. The cost to repair these and to continue putting money in there is very expensive. Right now, just to do a maintenance program in the Sahtu, we are looking at almost $700,000. That is for this summer.

I would like to thank the Member for supporting the initiative with regard to market housing because that is one initiative that I feel that we have to deliver. It has to be affordable. More importantly, you mentioned low income people trying to get homeownership. A lot of these people can't afford a $200,000 home. For most of them, that is their first home. I think you have to be realistically aware that most of these people probably have seasonal employment, either working in the oil and gas industry, which is mostly with regard to the oil and gas sector, and most of that activity takes place in the winter months. Again, we have to be open to that and also work with communities to look at homeownership.

One of the other things that I think is important is that we do have a process for communities to be more involved in program delivery. We have what you call universal partnership agreements that we sign. It is a contract between ourselves, the local housing authorities, the band councils, and community organizations to deliver programs on our behalf. We have the Seniors' Society in the NWT, where we have this type of agreement to assist us in getting out there and explaining our programs and services and sitting down with the elders to explain the elders maintenance programs and explaining to the homeowners that there are repair programs out there and then also assist them by way of filling out applications and working with people at the regional level to improve that communication. Again, those are some of the areas that we are working on. We are developing a housing strategy for the North and I think in order to go to Ottawa and

knock on doors and meet with the Minister, what they are asking for is give us a housing strategy made in the North that will deal with your challenges in the Northwest Territories and write down what it's going to cost and give us some ideas and solutions as to how to deal with your housing crisis in the North, and that's what we're doing. Again, that's something that has been requested by the federal Minister of Housing that he wants us to develop such a strategy for the Northwest Territories and also for Northern Canada. So then when we do argue with our federal counterparts from the provinces, we can say look, these are the challenges we have in the North. This is what it's going to cost to fix it and these are the programs that we're going to be delivering to do that. So again, that's how we're trying to deal with that problem. With that, Mr. Chair, thank you very much.