Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This is a real significant issue for us, and it has been for some time. We need proper office accommodations for the employees in Inuvik. We don’t have very many government facilities in the community; 93 per cent of our portfolio is leased.
It’s starting to be a challenge now that we can’t identify any new facilities to move to. We have certainly a large number of issues with the Perry Building. There’s a possibility we may be evicted. MACA is housed in an old federal government warehouse. It’s 45 years old. We have air quality concerns. We have security issues with some of the income support offices. We really don’t have a lot of choices.
There’s a comparison being made by the Member that the federal government did a market disruption analysis in Yellowknife, which is not a fair statement, because there are no facilities vacant in Inuvik that we can identify. Yellowknife has vacant space, and there is market disruption only if there is competition. In this case we can’t find it. We need a balanced investment. We need to have some of our own accommodations for employees so that we’re not held to a huge cost factor when it comes to rental space because we don’t have any choices.
We have committed to the developers in Inuvik that we’ll continue to rent the same amount of space from the private sector as we did prior to the closing of the Perry, and we will commit to that. I think this is a good project, and it’s something that we can’t ignore. The facilities that we currently accommodate also don’t have barrier free access. That’s a concern. So we need the appropriate space in Inuvik, Mr. Chairman. That’s why we’re bringing this forward. It’s not that we want to move away from some of those current agreements. We’d like to keep those. But there’s still not enough, and our current facilities are just not appropriate.