I think I’m still on here, right? I am? Okay. I think I was pretty well coming down to the end of my comments, anyway. I don’t think there were really any questions there. If I have any questions, I’ll save them for the page-by-page. So with that, Mr. Chair, I appreciate the opportunity to make a few comments. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Minister Miltenberger.

Thank you,

Mr.

Chairman. Even though there’s no specific

question, there are a lot of good points raised. In terms of funds going to Inuvik, out of the $41 million this year for all our programs, it’s $5.1 million. There are 20 units scheduled to be built this year as well in Inuvik to help meet some of their housing needs. The issue of having to take this step program before as opposed to after you get approved is one that we agree with as well. We’re going to look at revamping that so that once you’ve been identified as a successful candidate, you can take that. We do have arrangements right now where you can get basically block-funded with a non-repayable loan up to $90,000, depending on your income and where you fit on that priority, to be able to go to a bank to help you get a full mortgage.

As for seniors’ repairs, the issue has been raised, and we’re committed to looking at how we deliver that one. One of the things that has provided us with more clarity in our purpose and more direction has been the fact that we finally just released our strategic plan that we have been working on for the last six months or so. The Auditor General pointed out the need for a plan as well — not only a plan of where you want to go but laying out how you’re going to get there and how you’re going to be measured.

As for the issue of rental assessments, we’ll continue to work on that. As we move on boards and agencies to integrate health, housing and education, I think it’s going to bring those services together in a way that will allow it to be hopefully even more effective. We are committed to dealing with the arrears. We have been talking about that. That has been very well laid out for us by the Office of the Auditor General.

Another issue that is of interest that hasn’t been touched on yet: we are going to be moving to regionally debundle contracts so that there is an opportunity in regions for local businesses to be able to bid without having to bid for the whole territory. We are very concerned about the issue of mould, and we have some workshops being held north and south here in the territory with CMHC, who are recognized as the national leaders on the technical side of dealing with that particular issue.

Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. Mr. Beaulieu.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just general comments on the Housing Corporation from what I have dealt with over the past nine months or so since our election.

To date, about 80 per cent of all of the concerns from communities in Tu Nedhe have been on

housing. The majority of those concerns have been on seniors’ housing and home ownership. I look at this as a serious problem. I see it as a problem that started with the fact that the NWT Housing Corporation changed completely. They changed their focus on housing without completing a needs survey. The needs survey is essentially a tool that allows you to develop some sort of a housing plan. The housing strategy lasts until the next needs survey and is then based on the needs survey, looking at what the needs are, the incomes in those communities and so on. Then some sort of a focused housing strategy is developed.

What happens here is that the NWT Housing Corporation, without the benefit of a needs survey, has proceeded to change programs designed and put in place for the needs survey that was looking at the needs at that point. It changed their focus by, as mentioned earlier, reducing from 14 programs to 4 programs. I don’t really understand the concept of that. To me, it eliminated the focus on communities. Not every community in the Northwest Territories has the same needs.

The way I look at the communities, there are some that have a core need lower than the national average. An example would be, although I’m not trying to take away from these communities, the city of Yellowknife or the town of Norman Wells. Both of those communities have core needs far below the national average, while we have many, many, many communities across the Territories that are three times the national average. What I expected the Housing Corporation to do was to focus on reducing core need across the territory by addressing the core need issues that were much higher than the national average.

When I talk about focus, I am talking about a focus on the communities. In reality I don’t understand how the Housing Corporation can develop a strategy when you have needs survey data that’s old. Therefore, how do they know what has happened over the last 40 years, with the strategy that was in place up until that point, to be able to rewrite the programs? How do they know which communities have the highest core need or the lowest core need, except if they look back into history and see the trend? I’m assuming that may be the only way, and you can imagine how inaccurate that could be.

In addition to that, additional focus on the needs of various core needs groups…. Back several years ago seniors had the highest core needs. Individuals over 50 years old had the highest core need across the country, followed by single people with single incomes. So there was some focus on those two groups, and then the communities with the highest core needs were also the focus of the Housing Corporation in order to address the core need

issues. Like I said, it’s a matter of maybe lifting some serious core need issues.

I don’t know if this is correct, but assuming that the national average core needs issues is around 12 per cent across the country and that there are communities in the Northwest Territories that are well below that, and there are communities that are above 36 per cent — more than three times the national average…. My theory is that the Housing Corporation has to be able to concentrate its resources on the areas where there is most need. Right now it seems like the contribution from the Housing Corporation, the Infrastructure Acquisition Plan…. Although there is not enough in repairs really to do any really significant work other than maybe maintain a few people in their private homes for a few additional years, there is no real strategy to address the big issue of repair programs for senior citizens.

Like I said, the majority of the work in Tu Nedhe that has been dealing with seniors, where they have lost a program that was at one time in place — an easy program to administer by the Housing Corporation and an easy program for the seniors to understand…. That was taken out; it was replaced with a program which requires a lot more documentation than the seniors are used to dealing with. This will go on, and I’m assuming that eventually the seniors will get to a core needs point where the houses will not be repairable.

Concentrating a little bit of money on helping the seniors before their housing goes beyond economical repair would go a long way to assisting housing in general. I know that some complained about a lot of the seniors just jumping into public housing so that they don’t have to pay rent. However, that’s a program that’s done, and that’s a path. But right now we have seniors that are in their own homes that can just afford to operate their houses. They can’t really afford to do any enhancements in their units. I think that the Housing Corporation, with a little bit more expenditure, a little more focus on what they have to do in order to address these issues, could keep a lot of seniors out of core needs and eliminate additional pressures on the public housing inventory.

I think the affordable housing strategy is a good strategy, if the Housing Corporation had a good idea of the core need in each of the communities and were able to compare core needs from one community to another. Like I’ve indicated several times, my community of Fort Resolution in Tu Nedhe has empty AHI units — four or five empty units. What’s happening is that those units are based on the core need of the community, and they end up being inaccessible to the community. So what happens generally is that those houses will

slowly, eventually address another housing issue that could be housing for professionals.

However, that’s not the issue that those units were attempting to address, so they do nothing towards addressing the core need issue in that community. They will address other important areas, mind you, for teachers who need housing and so on. But that money is supposed to be focused on addressing core needs issues, so it’s beyond me why the houses were built and not allocated by this time. I hear that the houses were only there for eight months, but I know they’ve been there longer. I don’t know if they weren’t finalized until eight months ago or whatever.

The other thing is that I hope the Housing Corporation would have some sort of a strategy in place that would address the whole issue of the CMHC declining fund. It seems like this is starting to hit us, and it looks like the Housing Corporation is going to be ready to react. I’m hoping that when the CMHC money starts to decline sharply a couple of years from now, the Housing Corporation has a strategy in place to address that issue and not just a reaction.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Minister Miltenberger.

Mr. Chairman, we’re in the final year — actually, the final months — of the current needs survey that was done in 2004. Granted, it’s in its last year, and as the Member suggested, the information is somewhat dated. We are looking at moving forward in January to March of ’09 to look at redoing the needs survey, working in conjunction with the Executive as well. We’re also using, where it’s applicable, the 2006 census data, which gives us some information that’s more current.

The move and consolidation of 14 programs into four was done after a process of consultation. One of the big concerns from folks across the North was the need to simplify the access and the number of programs to make it easier to understand. That was one of the intents of consolidating from 14 to four. As I indicated in this House and I indicated to the Social Programs Committee, clearly we’re prepared to look at and revisit how those programs are structured, the number of them, and things like the seniors’ repair program possibly being moved out of there into a stand-alone program again. So we’re prepared to look at that.

We have tried to be flexible, and we recognize that there have been houses built that have been sitting empty. But as the Member for Tu Nedhe will recollect, we went to the LHO and talked about the housing delivery coming up. Initially it was geared for single people, and we were told very clearly that it in fact should be geared more to larger families.

So we adjusted that. We also are going to convert one of the housing units into fundings, to put more into the repair program. So we are interested in trying to be creative, responsive and flexible.

We struggle with our public housing stock. If we can take new units that are built and make them public housing, then it usually has to be done…. If we can take one of the older, more deteriorated units off the market…. The issue of owner money is what’s critical for us with the public housing units.

We are working, both at the national table and locally, in terms of what we do with the declining CHMC funding. I’m optimistic at this point that the federal government is going to step up to the table to make some kind of arrangement with us. In the meantime we have to look at picking up the slack. It’s a very, very big-ticket item, especially when you listen to the fiscal circumstances we’re currently in.

I have one more short comment on the Housing Corporation Mains. I notice that in the Infrastructure Acquisition Plan, which is part of the O&M inside the Mains, they have a fairly good-sized budget of over $38 million for this fiscal year, and then it drops off considerably, like in half. Again, I guess it's due to the fact that there would be no AHI funding coming in.

If this is the level of money that's needed in order to keep up to the core need issues across the Territories, I'm wondering if the corporation has any plan at all to somehow replace that money, aside from the motion that was made today that hopefully, if that gets anywhere, addresses the problem. If not, and it ends up being the resources that GNWT is going to be addressing the problem with, it would be good to have the corporation be able to tell us in advance, beyond this year, how they hope to address that issue.

Mr. Chairman, we have $17 million — that's the GNWT's share — that we're hoping to be able to carry on with. Even though the AHI at this point is not scheduled or slated to be extended, we're going to continue to work with the federal government, hopefully to get them to the table. We're going to be looking at trying to reinvest, once we start collecting on arrears, into housing.

We're very interested in partnerships like we did with Bailey House, to allow us to move forward on projects as well, and we're moving seriously to look at loan guarantees, as we've indicated, trying to deal with housing for professionals in communities — with hamlets, dev corps, any other businesses that are interested in putting up housing. So there are a number of things that we have on the go. But there will be a big hole if there's no extension to the AHI program and the federal funding dries up completely.

Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. Mr. Bromley.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just have one brief issue at this time, and it's referred to in the Standing Committee on Economic Development and Infrastructure.

The Affordable Housing Initiative had a progressive goal of getting 530 units in place, and I understand there are 174 planned for this year. I am concerned about the availability of suitable land and the land tenure issue in communities. It's something that's come up a number of times with my constituency concerns and also with a number of people who have been stymied in their home-ownership plans through some of the Housing Corporation's programs. I'm interested in what's being done about that and specifically how many of the 174 proposed units for this year have land secured for them now. Comments on those questions would be appreciated.

Minister Miltenberger.

Thank you. We'll give you the information we do have. I do agree with the Member that the issue of land tenure is the significant one, to the extent that we've put some land where…. In fact, we're looking within the Tlicho, for example. They're looking at bringing in a lands person to help sort out some of the land issues. I'll get Mr. Polakoff to speak as much as he can to that type of detail.

Mr. Polakoff.

I understand that you'll get me the information on how many units we have land secured for this year out of 174. Are things looking better for next year, and do we see an end to this issue in the near future? Or is this going to be an ongoing situation?

Yes, we will get you that information. This issue has also been pointed out by the Office of the Auditor General — and, no, we don't anticipate it diminishing in importance or any more land being freed up. The process is going to continue to be, I think, quite difficult in terms of being able to put houses down on land where there's tenure. We do have units, but in some cases no land to put them on. But we will get that information for the Member.

Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. Mr. Krutko.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. My question is in regard to the whole area of home ownership programs. As we all know, the government in the past couple years has re-profiled its programs. We went from 14 programs to four general programs. It was supposed to simplify the process. It was supposed to make dollars more accessible in regard to homeowners and people who need emergency repairs but also dollars to repair their units.

The thing that frustrates me is that going through the budget process, we can see under the Main Estimates for 2007–2008 that they were looking at $2 million for this program, which was just being rolled out. It's a new initiative. A lot of money was spent on PR and advertising and promotion of this program, yet in regard to the Revised Mains, it was $3 million. So that tells me there was a major increase in people applying for this program; it went up by $1 million, yet in regard to this budget process, it's being cut to $742,000. If anything, we should be enhancing the program rather than cutting it by almost two-thirds.

For myself, it's critical. I know a few Members touched on that if you go into a community, you can see the nice modern houses. But there are a lot of homeowners who basically have units that were built some 20 or 30 years ago, in regard to Webers and access units, HAP units, whatnot. Those homeowners need to be able to access emergency repairs or repair programs. Again, going through the budget process, we've enhanced the Housing Corporation's executive profile by putting more positions there; we've established a few more senior positions in the corporation. Yet we have drastically cut on the program side. For myself, that's an area I have a real problem with.

Just on another item, Mr. Chair, in regard to the area of housing programs, emergency repairs,

seniors’ repairs, we get a lot of frustrated people in our constituency who apply year after year after year for programs. On the one hand, they get accepted for…. They wait and wait and wait to get a response back from the regional office. But the whole idea of emergency repair is because it's an emergency. It needs to get quick attention, needs to be quickly responded to so that you can deal with the emergency at hand.

I think that as a corporation we have to do a better job of dealing with emergencies that come up by way of the Emergency Repair Program, especially for seniors in our communities who, in most cases, need the seniors’ assistance program. For a lot of them we want to try to keep the seniors in their own homes as long as they can but, more importantly, make it a safer environment for them to live in. Again, that program is like pulling teeth in communities just to get someone to go in, service the individual’s burners or check to make sure that things are being maintained and basically serviced on a regular basis.

Again, you know, there’s no reason that these programs couldn’t be delivered by the Local Housing Authority, a local contractor. Give him a contract to do it every year so that he goes in and does it.

For the amount of time that we deal with applications, people calling their MLAs.... I mean, I spend more time dealing with housing issues as an MLA than I probably deal with other health care issues and education issues. It’s always one of those issues that’s complicated by the process. There’s so much process, so many applications, so many review processes that we have to streamline it with the whole idea of making it more manageable. That was the idea of getting away from 14 programs to four areas. But, again, I don’t think we’re doing justice by cutting that program before it even gets off the ground.

So, Mr. Chair, I’ll leave those questions with the Minister and hope to see what his response is. I will have more to say on this.

Thank you, Mr. Krutko. Minister Miltenberger.

Thank you,

Mr. Chairman. I’ll just make a couple of comments. I’ll ask Mr. Polakoff if he could fill in with more detail.

Clearly, the issue of home repairs is an important one. But one of the struggles we have — and that’s why we have money in the budget for apprentices — is every community is struggling for an adequate number of tradesmen to actually get the work done.

We’re interested in, of course, sitting down, as I’ve indicated already. If there are ways that we can

further streamline or improve the process in terms of how programs are delivered, we’re prepared to do that.

I’ll ask Mr. Polakoff to speak in more detail about the money that was moved out of this home repair program and the corporation plan of how we’re going to carry on doing business.

Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Mr. Polakoff.

You know, as a government and as a corporation, I think we have to develop a comprehensive report or some sort of a process in regard to looking at the holistic approach of housing. I’m not just talking housing as a stick-built unit. I’m talking about housing for all classes of people, from disabled people to seniors to families to singles to transitional housing to basically shelters. I mean, we have to look at the whole configuration of housing, right from, like I say, the time an individual is born to the time they pass away, through a seniors’ home or whatever, through that system of housing.

I think that most jurisdictions in the country have looked at that. They have a comprehensive approach to housing. They work with NGOs. They work with seniors’ societies. They work with the private sector to look at housing and exactly what our long-term needs are — not five years down the road or ten years down the road — and where we’re going to be in 20 years, where we’re going to be in 50 years, and look at it through a comprehensive approach, looking at housing.

Also in regard to urban housing, rural housing and a comprehensive idea of where we’re going as a government…. Not just have a reaction every year to the budget process but look long term at where we’re going for housing.

Mr. Chair, I’d like to ask the Minister: would he seriously consider re-profiling or putting the dollars back with regard to the contribution assistance for residential enhancement programs, in which there was $3 million and now it’s $750,000 less? Is this something that the Minister can look at, re-profiling that amount, knowing that it has a detrimental effect on the whole idea of the programs and services that we deliver, and especially in regard to home repairs and assistance for homeowners?