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.