Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The number of units we have in the public housing stock is 2,400 units. That number hasn’t changed as a result of the Northern Housing Trust. The Member is right; by the end of this year we’ll have 500-and-some new units on the ground. Those units were put in place in some cases to private accommodation and in a lot of cases some of the money was spent to replace older public housing units. With these new dollars we intend to do the same thing, including upgrade a lot of the units.

The Member is quite correct when he says where is the new money going to come from. We have not received any new dollars for the public housing operations. We are still at $32 million. Of that, 15 percent is being raised through rents. The rest is all through government subsidy. We are on a declining subsidy scale. Every year we do get reduced. I believe this year it’s $750,000 that CMHC is cutting us back. Next year my understanding is that it will be around $3 million. The only way we can recover that is either to raise rents to operate our units or reduce the stock.

We do have a political challenge to convince the federal government that they cannot move away from this area of responsibility in social housing. We’re not alone. It’s not targeted only to us. It’s targeted to all jurisdictions across Canada. We’re creating alliances to try to address this to convince the federal government that they have to stay involved and this is a serious concern for all of us and we’ll continue to bring that message forward.