Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I named a number of suggestions and highlights of issues and frustrations in my Member’s statements and I just want to go through the Minister’s opening remarks here and point them out, and there are a good number of areas where I think things are going in the right direction or at least good now. We’re starting to take some good steps.

I want to acknowledge that in the past, prior to this year, we did get the 600 new units on the ground with some major completion of repairs. That’s a huge piece of work and curiously enough it’s presented some challenges that are unique and I’m glad to see that those are being addressed. I’ll mix that in in a bit here.

I am in concurrence that the primary focus for this fiscal year, this coming fiscal year, should be on improving existing social housing. To that end, I support the intent to deal with a number of replacements of public housing units, but especially modernizing and improving existing units. I think 126 was mentioned with the perspective that these investments are critical to enhance the long-term sustainability and energy efficiency of existing social housing which will, in turn, lower operating costs and so on. Lessen the impact of the CMHC funding and there’s no end to that drought in sight so I think we have to face the realities there. I’m glad to see this focus.

I also appreciate that the corporation has identified this new category of people who have income marginally exceeding the threshold and have come up with a plan to take advantage of the potential for home ownership there. That’s good work. They went out and found this category and they’re putting policies in place to address that.

The vacant strategy was obviously needed. This is getting back to my earlier comment about really having an unusual situation where we have some problems because of the rapid provision of these

units. This strategy has been needed. We’ll now see how well that’s carried out. I have to say that I’m absolutely stunned, to coin a phrase used by an apparently unknown colleague of mine, that we haven’t had any new inventory to our public housing since the early ‘90s. This to me is absolutely astounding. I think it is indeed appropriate that some of these vacant units be rolled over into that and start addressing that gap. I realize we have operational costs associated as well.

The next point I want to talk about here is the apprentices. This is a key program with relatively modest funding, but a key program. I think the Minister’s got that message that we’re very supportive, I’m certainly supportive of this. My understanding was there were about 11 established I think this fiscal year, ten or 11. Some adjustments and the intent is for another... Is that 2011-2012 or is that this fiscal year? Anyway, we can get into that in details. I’m very supportive of that.

I mentioned earlier to the Minister of ECE that there’s a huge need for apprentices in our communities -- no news there -- especially for oil burner mechanics. This would be a real service to communities which would help save on fuel bills and so on and also have some environmental benefits. Mostly it’s just practical, easy with the available skills thing that could be done with some real focus. I’m hoping to see that focus brought through the Housing Corporation’s Apprenticeship Program.

I guess the biggest thing in the association with the next item is the shelter policy review. The Minister I’m sure is aware that we fought hard to keep this fully funded because we see a real priority for this. We see a huge need to get it done. I guess, getting into my next point related to that, I support the department’s interdepartmental approach and collaboration of policy, planning and coordination. These are good words. We want to actually see this in a practical sense on the ground and reflected through the shelter policy review product.

The other thing we really want to see, and I should speak for myself here, is we want to be involved. We have made many suggestions that we think would fall into this and I think the Minister would recall that we had a good discussion of that in committee.

Throughout our term we have made quite a number of suggestions that have been either simply ignored or with very little follow-up or uptake. Surely we understand that we do need to do things a little differently given the realities that we’re facing here, and if we’re going to have a sustainable housing program, we need to do some things differently. I think the biggest thing is the strength of partnerships that mention need to be extended to the strength of partnerships with our clients. We

have a number of red-blooded, able-bodied people out there who do not have jobs that are in public housing and we need to do the job of figuring out how we can put those people to work in a way that addresses some of our costs. I have mentioned this before, but distributed energy systems where tenants are expected to provide a cord of wood a week or something like that for six weeks a year or whatever it might be, you know, a simple chainsaw and some training programs would take care of energy costs, a huge part of the energy costs of our housing programs. We know the forced policies are being worked on to allow this sort of thing and there are sustainable potentials here. These are where the potentials for gain are and they require a cross-departmental approach as the Housing Corporation is committing to follow. They’re not easy and I don’t have a lot of examples of them being done successfully yet in this government, despite the Premier’s pointing at these committees that he’s organized.

I’ll be looking for how this turns out at a practical level, but in the meantime I’m looking forward to discussing some of the detail and bringing out some examples here. Just by way of that, if I can offer the Minister this little tobacco for his pipe until we get around to the detail, the $925,000 small community dollars for hiring people, that in my mind should be directed through the Housing Corporation to hire public housing tenants and put them to work and develop their housing maintenance skills, wood cutting skills, whatever might be there. Where are our costs and where can we put the sort of skills that we can expect to be available with a minimal amount of training perhaps to address some of our costs here and get a long-term program going that builds on the savings and those sorts of things. Anyway. Enjoy your smoke. That’s all I have.