Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to speak about the consolidation of I think 16 or 17 previous housing programs into four and I think this place might be as good as any. It's where I think the Housing Corporation will depend on the district offices to carry out these enhanced programs.
Mr. Chairman, I just want to state that yesterday in my general comments I stated that this consolidation of programs aren't necessarily introducing a lot of new measures, to which the Minister corrected that there are some refining happening. I do accept that. I think Social Programs committee worked very closely in going through these revisions and I could assure you that we spent a number of meetings and lots of hours and we actually...I think by and large all the Members enjoyed that process. We had an initial presentation from the Minister and staff and we had a number of questions. The staff and the Minister were quite helpful and very cooperative in terms of incorporating those changes that were possible and coming back with a refined program. I really do appreciate that.
Another thing is, I really think, and I'm not trying to sound frivolous here, but I continue to be amazed at these very helpful four-letter words that the corporation came up with. That only comes with thinking about it and really concentrating on that. I do really appreciate that because we have now four programs in four very neat, four-letter words. So we have STEP, HELP, CARE, and PATH. I think that's important, because I think that speaks to what the corporation is trying to do. We're just really hung up on the four thing.
But I want to know now, I'd like to know, my understanding is there is no real new money going into this. I think it's the same amount of money the corporation had to work with to deliver 17 programs is now concentrated into these four. We, yesterday, got a very nice package in the mail with four pamphlets, of course.
---Laughter
Four-letter words and four of them. It's very good and I understand that this is going to be rolled out on April 1st and there's a press release going out and such, but I'd like to know in more detail about how this is going to be rolled out and do the staff need to be trained on this? What additional resources are there? Is there more money being put in these programs compared to what we had before? I'm going to ask just one more question and maybe the Minister could incorporate it into that. Often when we do these programs on paper it looks really nice and neat and tidy and they make sense, but on the ground sometimes that's not the case. For example, one thing that I could think of is that one of these programs speaks to the Repair Program and the ability of people to take care of their own property and to give them incentive to repairing them and such. But when we were in Wekweeti over the summertime to do pre-budget analysis, we had a long chat with community people and they spoke about instances where houses, a public house was damaged due to rain or, no, it was frozen while the tenant was away and the problems that they had in repairing it and the
requirement that the corporation had in who they could go to to get the repair work done. In fact, I think they might have had a local person who could fix certain things and they were told by Housing Corporation officials or staff or I don't know whom that that would not happen. So I guess what I'm saying is in implementing and thinking of these great ideas, that's a very important step, but I'm not sure if we're concentrating enough time on local resources, especially in very small communities where there are no shops. You can't go and get all things, you know. People in Yellowknife, for example, go to Canadian Tire and they can find everything. So even if you wanted to fix things, I mean, it's a pastime to spend all your weekend in Canadian Tire looking for parts to fix whatever you have.
---Interjection