Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions are directed to the Minister of the Housing Corporation in regard to my Member’s statement in regard to the transfer of administration housing assessment to ECE.
Mr. Speaker, what we’re finding is that a lot of the communities are behind, in some cases over a month, in receiving payment from ECE. The other issue is that the housing tenants also are having a challenge in communities where the income support worker does not reside in the community in which the individual is. They have to come from Inuvik or Fort McPherson to Tsiigehtchic and they schedule a day a month where the persons or the tenants have to make an appointment, get their assessment done and then they basically receive their subsidy. Yet, Mr. Speaker, there’s a cost burden where now what used to be done by the local housing authority is now done through ECE and now there’s the travel costs, the transportation costs and, again, we do not have these people in the communities, but we have LHOs, which still do what they used to do before.
So I’d just like to ask the Minister, has he seen any increase in regard to the amount of tenant evictions, tenant late payments and, more importantly, the payments to the authorities so that they can operate, and how many of them are now running a deficit because of the late payments?