Mahsi, Mr. Chair. I guess just to start off I think a lot of the questions that I was going to bring forward have already been asked by other Members, so I'll keep my questions brief. Again, I just want to thank the Minister and his staff, Jeff and Jeff, for providing us with it seems like good numbers, I guess, with the increase of 39

percent from the main estimates of last year. I just wanted to ask the Minister, I guess, he must have put a lot of thought into these nice acronyms that they have, the STEP, the HELP, the CARE, the PATH. Gee whiz, you know, that must have taken some real putting your heads together to come up with some housing acronyms that fit into these, but I like them anyway. They seem to be enlightening, I guess, for a lot of LHOs out there.

Just talking about the LHOs, I guess that's where a lot of my questions are going to be surrounding. I know there's always issues surrounding communication gaps between the LHOs and the headquarters, departments and the regional staff as to housing needs, housing processes, appeal processes and getting money from ECE or from the Housing Corp, and who's got the money and why isn't it at the LHO level. You know, issues like that. Updating our universal partnership agreements I think with the LHOs is way overdue. I think the ones that are in place now are pretty generic old documents that, as far as I can remember way back when I was with housing, they haven't changed it a bit.

I know that Mr. Polakoff is well aware that the Public Housing Steering Committee usually meets once or twice a year. They're comprised of managers, the LHOs, some of the ECE staff, Housing Corp staff to provide some recommendations to the Housing Corp, ECE and the government in general on how we can deliver housing more efficiently and effectively.

I just want maybe some general feedback on how seriously, like when this steering committee comes back with some recommendations to government, to the Housing Corp and to ECE on how we could make some positive changes in housing, are a lot of those recommendations really seriously put into what the Housing Corp wants to deliver over the course of the next year and why aren't those recommendations coming to our committee on Social Programs after their meetings are concluded? I know I got the minutes from the last couple of meetings that they had here in Yellowknife and there's a lot of good concerns and recommendations in there on how we can address some of these outstanding issues of arrears and market rent versus social housing and stuff. So are a lot of these recommendations every year put into this housing plan that we're going to deliver here for the next two to three years? I'll start with that. Thank you, Mr. Chair.