Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I had an opportunity today to brief the review, the 2009 Housing Needs Survey. As indicated in the Member’s statement or indicated in my discussion making some remarks on the budget, one of those two places yesterday, I talked about the increase in the core need across the Territory. Now it is kind of an interesting situation, because we can’t just look at the increase overall because the actual true reflection of what has happened in the small communities is actually greater than what the actual increase of the core needs in the needs survey is because of the decrease in Yellowknife, because Yellowknife has about half of the households. If Yellowknife has 60 percent of the households and Yellowknife decreases by a certain number, then you have to take the rest of the Territories, look at the overall increase plus the increase in that is the opposite effect of Yellowknife. It is like a seesaw. When the overall Territory increases by 3 percent but yet Yellowknife decreases by a certain amount of percentage and that is half of the households in the Territories, that means the increase in the small communities is greater than the average of 3 percent. That is what my point is.
It is very difficult to pinpoint exactly what the issue is. However, I think one of the issues is programs and policies that are being delivered by the Housing Corporation. I don’t see a real logical reason for eliminating programs and reducing programs and rolling programs into other programs and consolidating programs if the effect is going to be a decrease in core needs. You have the NWT Housing Corporation who has various programs,
some targeted to seniors, some targeted to seniors and disabled, so on and so forth. Some actually is targeted to singles and the majority targeted to families. You have that type of regime and your core need in the Territories is going down. The Housing Corporation decides that they are going to change that. They consolidate all of the programs into essentially four programs and then the core need goes up. Is it not incumbent upon the Housing Corporation to work towards decreasing core needs?
This is going to be my first question. Why is it that when places like Norman Wells, Yellowknife and other communities, which had a core need below the territorial average, went down further when the core needs that were already above the territorial average, above 16 percent in 2004, went up? Could I get the Minister to maybe explain that first? Thank you, Mr. Chairman.