Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Today I speak on housing. I’d like to see if we could get a rent scale. We’ve been bringing this up steady. I know that the Minister and the department have been looking into a three-tier system of dropping our rents down. We own these units outright by now. They’re very old units but well maintained. Most of them. If we could put a three-tiered system in from, say, your max rent would be $1,200, your minimum would be $800, and your low would be $600, and then not penalizing people who go and get part-time work. In the smaller communities people don’t want to go out and work because you’re being penalized for working and when the cheque comes in, a percentage goes to the corporation. I think if we worked at that I think we’d do a lot better for our people if we could put that into place.

The arrears, I know that meeting with the Minister numerous times with regard to moving in and talking with the communities, I know the Minister was working hard towards getting the arrears sorted out. He always says sort equity, people got to pay. And it’s true, but at the end of the day if they’re over a certain amount in so many years, the arrears for people who passed away, people and family members are being penalized for that. They’re still having to pay that and I think we should really look at that as well.

The people that are being evicted and are hard to house I think we should really look into and get that looked after. Some people in the communities are having 10 to 15 people in a four or five-bedroom house. That’s not right. I know it’s the client’s responsibility to pay, but I think if we could work with them with a little bit more open-handed approach and not make our guidelines ‘because the Minister is the boss and we could do that’ and work together with the people to keep their units and make minimal payments, for example, work with the Housing Corporation clearing steps over the minimum wage or something like that. Like I said, if the units are in not bad shape, but the windows and stuff, we could work towards that too.

Sachs Harbour, again I’d like to let the Minister know that we do need units in Sachs. We have young families coming back home that are trying to get into the community. I wish we could get one or two units in there for private home ownership. If it’s possible to look at getting a pilings and fuel tank program for private homeowners across the Territory, because in the smaller communities the pilings are rotting and the fuel tanks are leaking, which is causing people a lot of money to clean up, between $140,000, I heard, on the high end, and smaller at the lower end. It’s costing people a lot money if they don’t have home insurance.

For seniors repair, the program and maintenance program that we could give them for the windows and that, checking them every year. We have a list in the community, the LHOs should have a list of who are the private homeowners. Tuk did the Arctic Alliance. They went in and the kids did the windows this year. It was really good that the kids did that, the plastic wind covering for the windows for the draft coming in. That was a really good thing that the Tuk youth did in the community. We should get our maintenance staff to go and see if we can do that and fix that up, as well, once a year. The same with checking their furnaces and stuff, because we do have the harshest weather in the Territory.

Mr. Chair, the biggest thing is just working together. I know the Minister has a tough job and just working together to provide homes for our people that we represent and to be a little bit lenient. I look forward to the page by page of this department. Thank you, Mr. Chair.