There was a community liaison position that was piloted a couple of years ago and I’m not sure if it still exists, but now they’re having the single-window service centres that they’re trying, and maybe this is one area where they can be of assistance to the NWT Housing Corp.
It’s awfully hard to take folks out of the regional office and maybe move them into the communities. I think we might be better served if we were able to utilize the folks in the communities and be in contact with folks in the regional office.
I mean, we’ve seen a perfect example in one of the other jurisdictions of where they tried to decentralize and they had their finance office in one community and their head office in the other community and I think we’ve seen the $60 million result of that. So we need to try to have them as centralized as possible, but I take the Member’s point, though. It would be good to have folks go out to the communities. I mean, I get a list of all the visits that are into each community and we could utilize these pilot projects that are going to be happening. I think those particular folks that are going to be in the community would probably have to have a pretty good understanding of all the programs that are offered through the government, through the NWT Housing Corp. So I think this is one way that as a Housing Corp we can probably take advantage of this and be a part of this single-service window centre that the government is proposing to try to have in the communities. We’ll see how that works. If there’s a need further down the line to maybe have a liaison person, somebody that’s strictly housing, then that may be something we have to have a look at. But it would be awfully difficult to take the regional staff programs officer, for example, and maybe put them in another community that would be their home base. It possibly could work. I mean, I’d have to have a discussion, we’d have to have people that would want to do that. But our programs people do travel around quite a bit, but there’s opportunity to look at something like that and I’ll commit to the Member that I’ll have that discussion with the Housing Corp and we’ll see what we can accommodate. Thank you.