Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My statement today is very similar to that of my colleague Mr. Beaulieu.

Over the summer, since the last time we got together, I had an opportunity to travel to many communities in the Northwest Territories and I talked with a lot of different people, both on committee travel and other related business. One of the common concerns that became evident as I was travelling around talking to the different residents of the Northwest Territories is housing.

There were two issues that came up more than others and the first one was the number of vacant public housing units and the number of vacant houses that the Housing Corporation has available for sale. Last week the Minister made a statement where he talked specifically about some of these vacant units and the hard work that the department and the Housing Corporation were doing to try to liquidate and move these vacant houses out. I look forward to following up on that work and seeing what’s done in that area.

The other area of concern was arrears. A significant number of public housing tenants have gained and developed significant arrears, as my colleague mentioned, since the program moved from Housing Corp to Education and then back to the Housing Corp. These arrears are a big problem, because if you’re under arrears you don’t have an ability to access any of the other programs that the Housing Corp offers. So until we liquidate some of these arrears or the people pay back some of these arrears, they’re going to continue to have housing problems.

The big problem in this area is that because of the situation that my colleague described, is a number of individuals have what some people consider to be false arrears; they’re not actually in arrears. If they had been assessed in a timely manner and appropriately to begin with, they never would have developed these arrears. So what needs to happen is the Housing Corp needs to go and review these individuals’ files on an individual basis, those individuals who have arrears, to determine if, in fact, these individuals have arrears or whether they are these fake arrears that some people have exist out there.

Later today I will be asking the Minister responsible for the Housing Corp if they will go back and look at some of these arrears and determine which ones are real, which ones are not, and find a process to liquidate the ones that aren’t real if they, in fact, exist. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.