As indicated in the motion itself, many of the constituents that I represent — and speaking with other colleagues on this side of the House — have expressed a concern over the transfer that occurred last year of the Public Subsidy Program from the Housing Corporation to the EC&E.
It has caused many, many hardships over the past couple of years since that transfer. One of the things that I’ve heard time and time again is that it’s just not working. It’s just not working. And even to this date, we’ve spoken about it with the Minister, and we’ve spoken about in our committee system. They keep saying that it’s growing pains, it’s growing pains, but Mr. Speaker, it has been two years of growing pains, and I don’t want our people to suffer any more.
What I would like to do is initiate this change back to the way the programming was. Some of the negative effects that have happened, I have spoken about it before already in this House. Particularly, people are being evicted on a more frequent basis.
I’m getting many inquiries. In fact, the worst-case scenario happened in one of my communities of Fort Liard. A whole family was thrown out because they weren’t meeting the rent scale, but it was only for $1,000. I still think that was a misapplication of our rules and guidelines. Just because the programming has growing pains, our people are suffering. This is just one instance of it.
Over time I’ve been monitoring this, and I really spoke against it in the last Assembly, about transferring it over. I didn’t think it was the best thing to do, because once we’d transferred to the Subsidy Program in EC&E, it is under more severe scrutiny, and there are people — hardworking people — who made their monthly rent. Once we made the transfer to the EC&E, we’ve changed a whole bunch of things. We changed rental scale, so a house they were paying at a more comfortable rate for their salary, only $400 or $500 a month, got bumped up immediately to $1,500, and immediately many, many people went into arrears overnight in
the transition stages. Many people were in arrears. Good, hardworking people who had never been in arrears in their life, and actually had never needed government help, now had to go to see the EC&E and put themselves through the ordeal of applying for income support. It’s kind of a blow to self-esteem for hardworking families who had always made their payments.
Now, it is my belief that we’ve created a whole new segment of people who are in arrears that’s creating a whole new different level of needs and concerns in our communities that wasn’t there before, Mr.
Speaker. So by transferring the
responsibility of social housing back to the Housing Corporation where it began…. It was a much easier system to deliver to our people. People understood it, and now with two different locations, it’s a lot more confusing. Even two years later, Mr. Speaker, it’s still confusing to residents and constituents and clients who use our public housing.
So with that, those are my initial thoughts on this motion. I really do want to see this change initiated that transfers our housing back. I believe it will better serve our constituents with respect to this change.
Just in closing, too, I do believe it was a mistake that this House made. It’s okay to correct mistakes. It’s okay to say that we’re wrong; we made a mistake. In this case I believe that we did. I believe that we should return social housing back to the ministry responsible for the Housing Corporation.
Mahsi cho.