Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I, for one, was on the other side of the table when this decision was made some four years ago. The intention was to take the $30 million from the Housing Corporation, give it to ECE and transfer the money back to the housing authorities, so they could continue to pay for the operation and maintenance of their public housing units; some 2400 units. But the thing is, is through that transfer arrangement, there has been a lot of chaos in that process.
Mr. Speaker, the whole intent of social housing in the North -- at one time they used to call it Aboriginal Rural Housing in Northern Canada -- was to provide housing and subsidize it through the CMHC process. CMHC is the one that basically covers the costs for social housing all across Canada.
Yet, Mr. Speaker, what we are seeing now is because of the cost going up with regard to operating and maintaining housing in the Northwest Territories, there is not enough money to really operate and maintain the number of units that we have. Again, for the amount of money we are spending out of the $30 million for extra administration costs, the cost of people flying in and out of communities, the scenario that Mr. Hawkins mentioned is a good scenario if you are in a community such as Yellowknife. But when you go to a community and you don’t have income support workers and you don’t have a housing authority manager, you have to wait for someone to come into the community, sit down, do your paperwork and, hopefully, get the subsidy. If you don’t get the subsidy because you happen to miss a pay stub, you are going to get charged at the economic rate. That was not the way the system worked with the housing authorities before this transfer took place.
Mr. Speaker, what we are seeing is a system of dependence and also a system where basically people in communities are refusing to work on the basis that they’re penalized as soon as they get a job with a local contractor or get a job through a local agent by way of short-term work and they are being charged the economic rate because they went to income support. Sorry, can I see your pay stub? The guy doesn’t have his pay stub, so he goes back to Housing and says I don’t have my pay stub. Sorry, you are going to pay the economic rate. Then once you do that, you’re stuck in a situation where you’re in arrears. Because you are in arrears and you are no longer working, the cycle goes where the person was able to go to work, find a job, improve the quality of life for his family and he is not penalized because we have a system that is really
there to control a person’s lifestyle of I have a job, I am going to work, I am going to earn some money.
Before when the housing authority had it, there was a transition period. If you were laid off for some period of time, you were an income support client or paying the $32 a month, they will allow you a three or four-month transitional period to get back into the workforce. In the system we have now, that system is no longer there.
When I was up in Aklavik this last weekend I met with a business gentleman there who is trying to find people to work in the local cafe that he just opened up. He’s having problems and he knows good people that he wants to work, but they refuse to work because they know that as soon as they go to work their rent is going to go through the roof because they’re going to start paying economic rent. Because of that, people that work for the businesspeople in our communities won’t work for them anymore because they’ve been penalized to a point where it doesn’t make sense to work in our communities because the system we have does not allow that to happen. I think it’s at a point where it’s affecting not only the social well-being of the community but the economic viability of our communities because of the way the system is now in place.
The way it was before, you were able to sit down with Housing and say, look, I just got a job, I’m going to probably work for three or four months, and you were able to sit down with them and say, okay, this is how much I think I’m going to make in the next three or four months. I’ll agree to pay you this much, and then do another assessment on me in three months and we’ll see exactly how much I made and I’ll bring my pay stub in then. For me, that was the biggest downfall of this program. It has totally disrupted the communities’ resources by way of our people.
The dependency on income support is now at a point where they control every aspect of your life by way of education grants, housing grants, and also even seniors’ fuel subsidies. Seniors are refusing to go to income support because they’re going to basically say, well, who’s living with you. Can you give me a statement to see how many people are in your household? These seniors in their 80s are saying, well, forget it. I’ll pay for my own fuel. I’ll take care of my own bills. I’ve been doing it all my life. I don’t need you. Yet these are people who are living in their own homes because income support in our communities, the way they’re doing their assessment is not working. The way the Housing used to do the assessment, it was working.
For me, that is the biggest problem that I see with this system, is that it has totally lost the intention that was supposed to be there. It was supposed to
consolidate $100 million of programs and the government that operates by way of social support programs, and have a system that you can go in, you get your education grant, you can get your seniors’ fuel subsidy, you can get your housing subsidy, you can get, you know, check out your allowances that you get for child support. We’ve got a system that’s in one place. But the system that we have now is that we’ve got people flying from Inuvik to Tulita, or flying into Sachs or going into Tsiigehtchic so that basically they’ll come and if you don’t happen to be in town at the moment, you missed your assessment. Sorry, go to Housing. Well, we’re going to have to charge you economic rent because you didn’t make your meeting.
For me, the system is totally broken and we have to basically go back to where we started from and make sure that it works. It worked before and the system that we have now is broken. For me, being on that side of the House when we made this decision, housing authority, all they were thinking about, the Housing Corporation, was holy smokes, social housing is getting cut, maybe let’s give that problem to ECE and let them go get the extra money for housing. Then we’ll basically realize in 25 years it’s going to be zero, but that’s their problem. We’ll just charge them rent. Well, excuse me. That problem is still there. Thirty million dollars is still in somebody else’s hand, but we’re spending more money on administration and operational costs with that money, which is getting smaller and basically we have no idea how to replace it.
Mr. Speaker, I will be supporting the motion and I think it’s time that we gave the money back to Housing and run it the way it was.