Certainly in the days of these types of agreements usually done through an oral agreement with promises made either by the federal government and the agency and the land owners or the people who want their houses built. So any types of initiatives or attempts that the Premier could look at in terms of seeing if these long-term agreements could be resolved by the communities...There are issues that are still remaining with some of the people in our communities.

There are quite a number of communities that are affected by Indian band lands and when the federal government does transfers or no transfers or there’s a talk of transfers and swapping land, then parties feel they did not get what was being discussed. We are

trying to re-engage with the federal government. Municipal and Community Affairs, and Aboriginal Affairs and Intergovernmental Relations are looking at are there options or ways that we can sit down and try to clarify these concerns that remain outstanding.

Thank you, Mr. Roland. Final supplementary, Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I bring this up because my mother had mentioned that when they were going to tear down her father’s old house there that housing at that time said they were going to build a new house on that piece of land there that belonged to my grandparents. When we moved off they didn’t do what they promised they were going to do. I asked my mother how come she didn’t pursue it. She said, just leave it alone because it doesn’t seem like they’re going to follow up with the agreement.

So I think this is one example of many in the communities in terms of these types of oral agreements that haven’t been followed through with. That’s why I asked the Premier if there are any types of agreements with the aboriginal communities and people themselves who have this type of knowledge that seem to have lost faith in the government to honour their commitments from the days that they were told to give up part of their land for housing units.

It’s very difficult to go back in history to when an agreement was made verbally between the director-of-the-day, maybe under federal jurisdiction. What we have committed to in these areas where there are outstanding issues around IBA lands is looking at an avenue of trying to engage the federal government in settling these outstanding concerns about transfers, IBA lands and what it mean in some of our communities. So we are engaging in that and going to try to see if there is an avenue that we can work on and bring this to a conclusion. I can’t guarantee one way or another, but we are trying to work with the aboriginal government and chiefs in the Northwest Territories to look at an avenue where we can approach the federal government to bring some conclusion to this. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Roland. Item 8, written questions. Item, 9, returns to written questions. Item 10, replies to opening address. Item 11, petitions. Item 12, reports of standing and special committees. Item 13, reports of committees on the review of bills. Item 14, tabling of documents. The honourable Minister of Education, Culture and Employment, Mr. Lafferty.

Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I wish to table the following document entitled Towards Excellence: A Report on Education in the NWT. Mahsi, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Lafferty. Item 15, notices of motion. The honourable Member for Hay River South, Mrs. Groenewegen.

Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. Item 16, notices of motion for first reading of bills. The honourable Minister of Finance, Mr. Miltenberger.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I give notice that on Friday, March 6, 2009, I will move that Bill 9, Northern Employees

Benefits Service Pension Plan Protection Act, be read for the first time. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Colleagues, before I go to the next item on the Order Paper, the Chair is going to call a short break.

---SHORT RECESS

We’ll return to orders of the day. Item 17, motions. The honourable Member for Hay River South, Mrs. Groenewegen.

Mr. Speaker, I seek unanimous consent to deal with the motion I gave notice of earlier today. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

---Unanimous consent granted

Thank you, colleagues.

WHEREAS the responsibility for the administration of the Public Housing Rental Subsidy was moved to the Department of Education, Culture and Employment from the NWT Housing Corporation, effective April 2, 2005;

AND WHEREAS over the past four years this program transfer has negatively impacted the residents of the Northwest Territories who live in social housing by unnecessarily complicating what was a simple process administered by the local housing organization;

AND WHEREAS one of the consequences of this program transfer has been an increase to the number of households that are in arrears with their local housing organizations;

AND WHEREAS these same local housing organizations and the NWT Housing Corporation have demonstrated their capacity and competence in administering social housing and in dealing with tenants in social housing in a professional manner;

AND WHEREAS many people have expressed concerns to Members centred on the delivery of social housing and problems encountered since the program transfer to the Department of Education, Culture and Employment;

AND WHEREAS the same material facts that led the 15th Assembly to adopt Motion 10-15(5) on November 1, 2006, directing the government to

return responsibility for administering the Public Housing Rental Subsidy to the NWT Housing Corporation and its local housing organizations, still exist;

NOW THEREFORE I MOVE, seconded by the honourable Member for Nahendeh, that this Legislative Assembly strongly recommends that the full responsibility for the administration of the Public Housing Rental Subsidy Program be once again placed under the control of the local housing organizations;

AND FURTHER, that all related budgets now with the Department of Education, Culture and Employment be transferred back to the NWT Housing Corporation;

AND FURTHERMORE, that this Legislative Assembly recommends the government provide a response for this motion within 120 days.

---Applause

Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. The motion is on the floor. The motion is in order. To the motion. The honourable Member for Hay River South, Mrs. Groenewegen.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the transfer of the Housing Subsidy Program from the NWT Housing Corporation to the Department of Education, Culture and Employment was an idea that was hatched in the 15th Assembly

and it was promoted under the auspices or under the theory that putting all subsidies, whether it be for child care, seniors’ fossil fuel subsidies, like you think of every subsidy you can think of government-wide and it was this government’s intention under the Minister-of-the-day for ECE that we should harmonize all subsidies under one desk, one-stop shopping in the Northwest Territories. That necessarily included the biggest piece of the subsidy, which was the housing subsidy and the funds associated with the housing subsidy to transfer over to the Department of Education, Culture and Employment.

Mr. Speaker, that was the beginning and it has not worked out. I think it’s an idea that the Minister-of-the-day picked up at some national Ministers conference some place that this would be a good idea. You know, maybe it seemed simplified administratively, you know, in style, fashionable way for us to do this, but the fact of the matter is there is a longstanding history of the work and interaction in all of our communities by the local housing organizations who had tenant relation officers, who had the capacity in their offices to deal with their housing clients.

Mr. Speaker, this idea that all subsidies should be harmonized and should all be at one window in the

Northwest Territories, is the idea…I just lost my train of thought for one second. The idea is premised on the fact that everybody who requires social housing or the services of the housing authority are income support clients and that is absolutely wrong.

Not everybody was on income support who went to the local housing organization and got subsidized housing. But be sure now, Mr. Speaker, that we have made sure, as a government, that every person who requires social housing is now an income support client.

There is nothing wrong with being an income support client if you need to receive income support. Nobody is suggesting that is a bad or a disrespectable position to be in. It is income support. It is what it is. But there were many people working in our communities who felt like they were working and they may not be able to afford market rent and maybe there was not any private stock in some of the small communities to rent in the first place. They had to be the clients of the local housing authority. They had to live in social housing because there just wasn’t any option for them. That didn’t mean that they were not hardworking, trying-to-make-ends-meet people, but now we’ve said, no, you go over to the ECE. You go to the income support officer.

You subject yourself to the rigorous scrutiny of the assessment that takes place when somebody requires income support. I think it was a mistake. This idea of one stop never developed. It never evolved because, in all of our communities, we still have an office where there is an income support complement of staff or a staff member and we still have our local housing authorities. So the one-stop thing never materialized. All it did was put an administrative burden for those two offices to necessarily have to keep communicating with each other and have to send clients to not just one place but to two places.

Mr. Speaker, I think that this whole idea of this transfer was premised on something that was ill conceived. I don’t think the benefits have materialized. I think it has created hardship in many cases for people who maybe, for whatever reason, did not want to go to income support to get their rent subsidy.

If we could just project ourselves for a couple of minutes into a small community, someplace in the Northwest Territories. Pick any small community where there are not that many people and people tend to know a lot about what goes on in people’s lives in the community. Let’s imagine a young family. Let’s imagine a young man who is the provider in that family. Let’s say that he has been able, through either traditional lifestyle efforts and

maybe part-time work, to go out there and be able to proudly provide for his family. But he comes back to the community one day and our government has said, no, no. You now will go and join those other people in the community who have not been able, for whatever reason, to be able to maintain a work situation where they can provide for their family. You must go and join with everybody else now, and you must go over to the income support office and you must go to somebody that you probably know really well. Why don’t you just lay out everything; how much money you earn, what your fuel bill is, what your power bill is every month? You go there and you lay that out probably to somebody that you likely know very well. There is an intangible issue. I grant you that, but it is an issue of some degree of pride that people take in being able to manage to work and provide for their families. So we are saying no, you are now an income support client, and you will go there, and you will meet with that worker and, you will provide that information to them, otherwise you cannot live in our public housing unit. If you don’t go there, we are going to bump your rent up to what we call the economic rent, which is probably not even affordable. So people didn’t have much choice. So they didn’t go and then they were in arrears and into all kinds of other problems.

Mr. Speaker, that is just one small scenario of a case where I think that this transfer was not thought out well. I think it was, to some degree, and I had it put so well by one of my colleagues, that what we did is we turned every housing client in the Northwest Territories into an income support client in doing this. Like I said, there is no shame in asking for help and going to income support if you need it, but there were people who were managing and there were no choices but to rent from the Housing Corporation through the Social Housing Program. There was not a choice.

Mr. Speaker, I will defer now to other members of the Standing Committee on Priorities and Planning, from which this motion evolved, and ask them to speak to this motion. I will wind up the communication or the presentation on a motion. Thank you.

Thank you, Mrs. Groenewegen. To the motion. The honourable Member for Nahendeh, Mr. Menicoche.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I, too, will be speaking in favour of the motion. I was happy to stand my name as a seconder. I have been opposed to the transfer of the responsibility of the social housing to ECE since its inception. I have always thought it was not the right thing to do. It was going to create hardships for our residents and the clients of the NWT Housing Corporation. Indeed, the stories are many about people falling in

arrears because they did not understand the program. I believe even some people to this day are still in arrears because of this transfer. Because of the way the system is set up, it literally forced people to go from a $600 assessment to economic rent of about $1,200 to $1,400, Mr. Speaker. It was a shock to the system. People just could not believe that we, as a government, would do that.

When I was working with the Housing Corporation, Mr. Speaker, the very same people would go to the Housing Corporation. They felt it was a smoother transition. They knew how much to budget for their rent. Now it is left in the hands of ECE and their guidelines and policies, so they really don’t know what to budget for and they are at the whim of what they assess, Mr. Speaker. That creates uncertainty. That creates disharmony within their budgeting cycles, especially now when times are tough, Mr. Speaker.

I asked a question earlier in the House. What was the difference between assessing it when it was with Housing and assessing it now? I wasn’t able to get a clear answer, but I know the constituents know for sure. It was, I think, Mrs. Groenewegen who said it best. It was less intrusive, which means that they weren’t divulging all kinds of information and bearing their soul to program officers. It is because of the policies and guidelines. Whereas with the Housing Corporation, I believe there was some more flexibility. There was more trust. There was a relationship that clients had with the housing authorities. For me, it always made sense to keep it there. There is an issue of harmonization and one-stop shopping. To me it just doesn’t work. It was the flavour of the day back then. It seemed like the right thing to do.

I think it goes further than that too, Mr. Speaker. The Deloitte & Touche report of I think the year 2000 spoke about this harmonization of programs. I don’t know how or why it seems that we are still following some of the programming suggestions from that report. In fact, when they talked about creating one big infrastructure department, that comes from that Deloitte & Touche report. I don’t know how or why it is a major component of our bureaucracy that it is the best thing to do since sliced bread, but that is not always the case. I spoke about it in my Member’s statement. I believe in this case we took a southern solution, fit it up here to make it work, but it is just not working. It is creating more upsets than anything else.

The Minister spoke today during question period that their initial assessments were showing positive results, but that is something we have been asking for too, Mr. Speaker. Show us. Ever since we did a similar motion a year ago, they promised to assess the program and assess how it is working with ECE. The Housing Minister was going to get

involved in this assessment, but to date they haven’t given us any feedback at all. They were pretty happy today quoting some of their stats, some of their information and some of the internal assessments, letting us know that, to them, it is working, but they’re not sharing that with us.

At the same time, too, something of this magnitude in similar interests throughout all our constituents’ courses are the electrical rates. That is something I have been pursuing for some time as well, Mr. Speaker. I am glad to see that there is movement on many fronts and the most particular importance was getting out to the communities, getting the people’s input, and I know my constituents are looking forward to that when it begins in April. I believe that this issue is big enough to do something similar, Mr. Speaker, and to hear not only from us but to hear it from the regions and the communities and the larger centres as well. At the same time, Mr. Speaker, I am not convinced that it is working where it is at right now. I am not convinced that it is serving people to their best interest. I believe that it is not making life easy. That is why I support this motion. With that, Mr. Speaker, I will just conclude my statement. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Menicoche. To the motion. The honourable Member for Nunakput, Mr. Jacobson.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I am very pleased to see this motion come forward. I am in full support of it. Due to the housing situations in my riding of Nunakput, we have a serious problem with the disconnect with ECE and the Housing Corporation. Some of my constituents tell me when I go home -- on the average day I take 60 to 70 calls in my residence -- about being evicted. Since ECE took over this year, Mr. Speaker, there have been evictions in the communities; four or five people. It is the middle of winter, 30 to 40 below outside. Where are you going to go? You are going to go to your cousin’s place. Hopefully they will put you up. For myself, the disconnect between the two not having the Housing Corporation run itself as a stand-alone corporation and cut out the middle man, which is ECE, and then we are not going to have the blame game when it is time to…They are not going to be saying you have to go to ECE or Housing. It is not going to be like that. Hopefully we can get it put back into Housing where it is going to be…I think that the Minister, speaking of the Minister today, I have issues up in my riding today that made the news. There are people being evicted and put out in the cold and finding a place to stay. It is not right.

The biggest thing is the evictions, the disconnect between ECE and that is most important, the one-stop shopping in regards to going and paying your

rent and getting it all sorted out with Housing and then you get to go home. See you in a month. Here you have to go and run-around, like Mrs. Groenewegen said, to ECE and see if you are going to be supplied to get help to top up your rent. If you don’t get it, what are you going to do? Automatically you don’t show up, you are going to get charged economic rent. That is not right. Everybody is going to have a chance to speak to it.

Today, Mr. Krutko and myself, living up in the communities, people don’t see the most important thing in my riding is housing. It is the most important thing. People need places to live. You have houses in the communities that are boarded up because of people being evicted. We have to give them the opportunity to work this off through the Housing Corporation. They had a program a few years back in regards to paying off your arrears. Work in the summertime or at part-time jobs to get it paid off. That is having the Housing Corporation and the LHOs managing it themselves and not having ECE as a middle man.

I fully support this motion. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Jacobson. To the motion. The honourable Member for Great Slave, Mr. Abernethy.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I rise today in support of this motion. This is the second time that I have stood in this House in support of a motion to return the administration of the public housing subsidy back to the NWT Housing Corporation. It is also the third time that many Members who were here during the 15th Assembly

have stood asking Cabinet to realize that the current program is not working and return it to its rightful home, the NWT Housing Corporation.

Mr. Speaker, there is nothing wrong in admitting that a mistake was made. With this motion, we are hoping that Cabinet would see reason, recognize the mistake and transfer the responsibility back to the NWT Housing Corporation, and the $30 million that came along with it. Allow the local housing authorities to do the job that they have done for years and years, something that they have done really well.

Mr. Speaker, the old system was an easier process for the tenants. We all have to listen to what our constituents are telling us. I have heard people express frustration with how the program works within Education, Culture and Employment. Tenants are having to wait three weeks to have their assessments done. Many people that were never in arrears before are in arrears because of the lateness of the assessments getting back to the LHOs. LHOs have had a reputation of treating tenants professionally and respectfully. The NWT

Housing Corporation’s partnership with the LHOs did a good job in administering the public housing. The system was not broken. It did not need fixing. Now, with the new system and the new model of administration through income support at ECE, the Public Housing Program is broken in the NWT, broken and in need of repair.

So I encourage Cabinet to acknowledge and act on this motion in the best interest of all people of the Northwest Territories. Return the responsibility of the public housing subsidy back to the NWT Housing Corporation, and the $30 million that came along with it.

As I said earlier, there is nothing wrong with admitting a mistake was made and correcting it. I believe the Housing Corporation is ready and able to take this back on if we just give them the authority to do so.

Mr. Speaker, I support this motion. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Abernethy. To the motion. The honourable Member for Kam Lake, Mr. Ramsay.