Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As we know, the transfer of the Public Housing Program to the Department of Education, Culture and Employment experience did not work. The transfer was meant to harmonize the Public Housing Program and the Income Support Program, but this was not achieved and, if anything, it had the opposite effect and created much more problems for public housing tenants.

As a result, the Public Housing Program was transferred back to the NWT Housing Corporation; however, the old rules are still in place from before the transfer took place and now remain in place. It is these guidelines that have been the source of all the problems. So what we thought as MLAs was a victory by moving the program back was short lived.

Under these guidelines there are more and more public housing tenants now continuing to accumulate greater arrears. These tenants who are already finding it difficult to make ends meet are now slowly losing hope of ever being free of the thousands of dollars of rental arrears. In many communities unemployed tenants are being charged maximum or economic rent because they are not following the rules that we as MLAs thought were thrown out with the transfer back to the local housing organizations. However, this was not the case. Many of these tenants are still the same tenants that were in public housing before the transfer to ECE and now, because of the new rules, they find themselves continuing to accumulate arrears.

This government must completely correct the mistakes made by past governments and must fully move back to the old system where tenants on income support or tenants who are simply unemployed are charged $32, not $1,800. I thought this government understood the problem was not with the people that were delivering the program, it was the program itself. We must go back to the original program.