Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We encourage people to get into homeownership, so we have a Supported Lease Program where we help people make that transition from public housing to homeownership. Currently there are 112 units in the Territories that are under the Supported Lease Program. We don't have the staff to maintain them and so on ourselves, on the ground, so we pay the LHO $100 a month per unit plus some utility money for them to maintain these units for us. So

far, Mr. Chairman, it's been a very effective way of getting people into homeownership. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Minister. Mr. Braden.

Okay. Mr. Chairman, I guess I'm trying to figure out why did the Housing Corporation have to step in and pay for this service? Is it not something that the tenants were otherwise obliged to pay for? I'm just questioning why does government have to come in and pick up something that would seem should be a user fee type of service, Mr. Chairman?

Thank you, Mr. Braden. Mr. Minister.

Mr. Chairman, these units are units in which the people are moving toward homeownership, so they are in addition to the public housing units that the LHOs have the mandate to manage. So we pay them $100 a month per unit to do that management for us. I had said utilities, but it's actually maintenance. The client pays the utilities. We just help the LHO with the maintenance costs with some small amount of money. But this is, as I say, a program aimed at getting people who have the means to get into homeownership.

Thank you, Mr. Minister. Mr. Braden.

Okay. Well, if those people have the means to get into homeownership, then I guess I'm still not satisfied that we should continue to be subsidizing them or creating these kind of dependencies, Mr. Chairman. Is this an expense that we're going to see disappear in time? Or is this likely to grow? It seems that when we do create these kind of new assistance programs and things, which way do they go? They go up. If I understand the purpose or the function of it, I do not understand the logic or the sustainability of it. Can we expect or anticipate that this budget line is going to at some point disappear, Mr. Chairman?

Thank you, Mr. Braden. Mr. Minister.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There are people in the communities who don't have experience with homeownership. They've been in public housing for several generations now, so they don't have the experience. They have the means in the sense that they now have employment, they have a job, they have the future to be able to own and maintain their own home. So we have a program that is a transition to help them move from being completely dependent on the Housing Corporation in a public housing unit to one where they will become a homeowner. We help people through that and the help goes from anything, from the maintenance of a home, how to maintain a home, to paying mortgages, to paying utilities. So it's meant as a transition. The line will disappear eventually when we have reached our targets on homeownership or the number of people who can take that on. So people will move. This Supported Lease Program really becomes the core of the Homeownership Entry Level Program in our new programs. Most people who are successful in that will move onto the next one, which is where we provide assistance on their financing, becoming a full homeowner. So those people will be off our rolls. There may be new ones coming up later on, but in the long term, yes, it will disappear.

Mr. Chairman, I know that one of the things that the Legislature insisted the corporation end just last year was adding some 17 new, was it 17 new PYs? Most of them in the communities and the regions. I guess it concerns me, Mr. Chairman, that we keep adding and adding and adding to the size of the workforce in the Housing Corporation and yet we still have to go out, as the Minister has explained, to the private sector to get yet more assistance to run our programs. So the growth of the corporation, as it's illustrated here, it's not a big deal, $226,000 in the great scheme of things. But it still illustrates that we have a Housing Corporation that is intent on growing itself. I'm not comfortable with this kind of a program, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Braden. Mr. Minister.

Mr. Chairman, I can assure you that I am not at all interested in growing a larger and larger Housing Corporation. That's not where we're going. But we do have a program for three years to deliver about 530 new homeownership units or major repairs and so on. We have our regular programs to carry on. The bulk of the positions, 16 positions, are term positions. Those are there for the delivery of the affordable housing initiative. At the end of that they will disappear, unless we were to get another lump of money to be able to add to our homeownership programs. But those are only for term. We're not trying to build up something. We need them for technical support for the reasons we were just talking about, energy efficiencies and so on, and we need them for land. That's where the 16 of the 18, or 16 of the 17 are being utilized or proposed to be utilized.

Thank you, Mr. Minister. We are on page 2-162, infrastructure development, grants and contributions, contributions, $1.596 million. Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just wanted to ask the Minister, and I listened very carefully to the discussions between my colleague and the Minister of Housing Corporation in terms of the Supported Lease Program. This is a term position, I understand. These are terms positions. These positions, I guess, are to help our people, hopefully in the long run, to get off the dependency of housing. That's to help them become homeowners and live like the rest of Canada. People are going to own their homes. As you know, in our smaller communities this issue is a long-standing issue that has many different interpretations, so this is a new program. So I want to ask the Minister, this program here, because this program is going to be helping my people in my region, what's different than yesterday by introducing this program to help them? As you had some old programs that the Housing Corporation was running and now we're coming into a new area of programming. Just for clarification. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mahsi, Mr. Yakeleya. Mr. Minister.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Well, I'll tell you, one of the more obvious differences we hope

that this will make is about $6 million in arrears. We know we cannot take people who have lived in public housing for two or three generations, entice them into homeownership, not give them the support they need to understand what they've got themselves into, whether it's paying for the utilities regularly, paying the mortgage, or maintaining the house themselves so it doesn't collapse around them. We got people from being independent out on the land into public housing, now we have to help them back out of it. If we just continued what we were doing of getting people straight from public housing and getting them into homeownership, no support, then I think that's one thing that's going to cause that arrears to just keep going and going and going and people to walk away and abandon units because they weren't well maintained. So that's going to be the difference. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Minister. Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Premier. I think that's the type of answer that the people need to hear in the communities in terms of that dependency. To bring them back to a state of, an attitude of having their own dependency, this could take a while. Of being independent to where they were living in government housing and all of a sudden became very dependent on government. Now we're reversing. So I guess that answers one of my questions in my mind while I was driving down from Tulita to Yellowknife. How does this government create an attitude of self-reliance and healthy choices? It's a very tricky question, because a lot of our children grew up in possibly these public rental units that we have in the community where we have running water and electricity. May I dare say you and I grew up where there was no running water. The only running water that we had was from the Mackenzie River back to our cabin with a pail in our hands, and had electricity with gas. We were our own -- should I say, waste management specialists -- with a honey bucket system. So I guess, Mr. Chairman, I guess I'm asking because this is a really important program we have for our people in the Northwest Territories that, that's what we try to do with the government. This Supported Lease Program, I'm very supportive of it and confident that we are on the right track. I just do not want to see the perception that we could do this in two years or three years. It's going to take a longer time. So if we say term position, I hope we can do it in two or three years. I would support the Minister and his staff to see how far we can go. I think he's on the right track, Mr. Chairman. It's a lot of work and he's answered somewhat my question in terms of my own thinking and in terms of how do we create a generation of dependency and homeownership. We certainly have a different lifestyle. That's what I was trying to get at. It's not to be hard on anybody or to be rough on the people who live, because it's no fault of theirs. That's no fault of theirs. We have created it ourselves. So ourselves we have to do it. So I think this government is on the right track in terms of how do we do this. That's where we're going to see the benefits in 10 or 25 years. So I don't know if it's a question there, Mr. Chairman. I think it's a comment and my thoughts to the Minister. Thank you.

Mahsi, Mr. Yakeleya. It's just a comment. We'll now go back to page 2-162, infrastructure development, grants and contributions, contributions, $1.596 million.

Page 2-165, district operations, operations expenditure summary, $37.818 million. Ms. Lee.

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

It's the number one Canadian men's hobby, I understand.

---Laughter

But I'd like to know, seriously, what, are we going to spend any time in not only teaching, encouraging people to work on those, but we need to provide resources and why is it that in every community we don't have a hamlet or somewhere where people gather, where they could store some parts, in the general store or something? Is there anything like that? I think there's about five questions. Sorry.