Sorry. Minister of Health. We were engaged in an initiative called harmonization, which carried on until the 14th Assembly, with a certain number of fits and starts, and then further into the 15th , where it was put into
place with the one-window approach.
Mr.
Speaker, I’ve been an MLA now for over
12 years. Housing has always been the major issue in my community in terms of concerns. One of the reasons we moved to harmonization and the one-window approach was because of the extreme dissatisfaction with the then-current system or the system of the old days, when there were a number of doors to go through. There were stovepipes, where Education handled social support, and before that, Social Services handled welfare. They didn’t talk to each other, and clients were shuffled from pillar to post, trying to get things done.
The decision was made, after many years of study and debate, to do this process we have now. I just ask for the time to, in fact, give us the chance to put into place the things we’ve been working on. We’ve brought LHO chairs and managers into Yellowknife for the first time in years to sit down with the district staff, headquarters staff and ECE folks.
We have working committees now between the two departments, running community-by-community to sort out where there are problems in terms of the assessment and timeliness, and what are the options that we can put into place. We are identifying solutions community by community.
So I appreciate the concern, and I want to recognize it. Yes, housing is an issue for every one of us. We want to have the best possible system for our constituencies, our constituents that we all serve. We are facing very knowledgeable critics — former Ministers, former presidents of the Housing Corporation, long-term employees of the Housing Corporation that are intimately familiar with the workings, plus all the other Members.
So we take the concerns very seriously. We will be coming back in June, as we promised, to lay out what we’ve done and what progress we can demonstrate to this House.