Okay, you know, Mr. Chairman, I'm not going to challenge the Minister or doubt that he's wrong, but he's introduced something in here that I can't understand. He's talking about capital, I'm talking about operations. He may be entirely correct, but perhaps we're going off on a tangent here in our venue this evening, Mr. Chairman. I really think we'll be spinning our tires. I won't say that the Minister's wrong, but I still remain very concerned that there is a trend even in some of the forecasts that committee was presented with that showed the corporation was quite prepared to, from the information I saw on an operational basis, take money from the communities and spend it at headquarters. I might in another venue be convinced otherwise.
Mr. Chairman, there has been a lot of discussion this evening about the market housing initiative and it's an area that really concerns me to quite a degree based on the expectations or objectives that were outlined for this program. Optimistically and appropriately when things came together for this program early last year we certainly took this on as something that was going to fulfill a very urgent need in the small communities to help those communities attract and keep essential public workers, teachers, nurses, and other health professionals, to be specific. But we have before us now a very sorry report on the outcome of that program of, what was it? Twenty-two units delivered over the course of several months this summer and fall; nine I understand are occupied. The difficulties encountered by our corporation in bringing these in, the Minister has gone on at length about all the different problems and hassles and things that occurred. I get bored, Mr. Chairman, listening to this, especially coming from an organization that this year so proudly declared 30 years of operations and expertise and knowledge in the Northwest Territories. Yet they still came back and said we had problems finding gravel and problems putting in power and this kind of thing. This is not the kind of thing I want to hear, Mr. Chairman, from the agency that has 108 people working for it and a budget of $100 million and yet comes back and says we had a problem installing some trailers in some of our communities.
I note, too, Mr. Chairman, some similarities between what went wrong with the market housing initiative and what went wrong with the corporation's attempt to sell houses to Alaska as outlined in the 2004 report of the Auditor General to this Assembly, which was tabled in this House last October. I'm going to paraphrase very briefly from this, but there are correlations here that I think are worth highlighting, Mr. Chairman. The Auditor General commented on the Housing Corporation's shipment of unassembled housing units to Alaska saying that, knowing that, by the way, I guess the end story should be clear, only one of nine units were sold to this village in Alaska. The rest of them, by a series of almost comedic decisions, ended up on the beach at Tuktoyaktuk. We don't quite know what their status is from there. I'll get to that in a few minutes. But in the meantime, the Auditor General said that any time a venture fails it is important to investigate why and to ask what should be done differently in the future. The corporation tried to sell housing units in Alaska on which it lost money. In our view, management, and here's the point I find interesting on this case, the Auditor General says, in our view, management failed to follow certain basic accepted business practices which could have reduced its risk. For instance, in August of 2001 the corporation shipped nine unassembled housing units to the state of Alaska. This was done based on a verbal agreement with municipal authorities that the village would purchase the units.
Mr. Chairman, this, I think, is pretty much what the Housing Corporation did last summer when it decided to send 22 units to, how many different communities, 66 beds out there. Mr. Chairman, I'm looking at the government, at the Cabinet, because we should keep in mind that it was the Cabinet that issued a directive to the Housing Corporation to do this. Now, it is not commonplace for the Cabinet to release publicly or to MLAs records of decisions, so I cannot, I will not be able, Mr. Chairman, to assess whether the corporation really followed to the letter the instruction from Cabinet. I'm assuming here, Mr. Chairman, that it may not have been a very well crafted directive to the Housing Corporation because, boy, we went all over the place here.
Verbal agreements, as the Auditor General points out, were essentially what the Housing Corporation, from information I have, took to be its instruction. They were going to put so many houses in these communities. We're going to do it our way. Another basic business practice that was ignored: Where were the surveys and information from the target audience, the nurses and the teachers who we really wanted to house? There's no evidence at all. Despite committee's request last spring that they do that, that they go and talk to these people, well, no, that never happened. Now they're coming back, Mr. Chairman, and asking us to do this all over again for another $2.6 million and I have yet to see any evidence, Mr. Chairman, that the corporation or Cabinet -- these are the people who issue the directives -- has insisted that we get better market information so that we can design our product to suit the needs of that market.
The Auditor General goes on to say in this report that the corporation could have reduced its risks and losses if its management had a signed sales agreement before shipping the houses to Alaska. What a radical concept, Mr. Chairman.