Just following up on a question asked by my colleague Mr. Bromley in regard to how do we help LHOs getting out of arrears. I think Tsiigehtchic should be a good role model for people to follow because they had the same problem. They basically had to downsize their operation in which they, like you mentioned, they just simply cut themselves right down to two people. You have a maintainer and basically a local administrator. But again, what they did there was they worked with their tenants, they found a bunch of units they had to dispose of, they hired people, or didn’t hire them but basically told the tenants you’ve got arrears, there’s a way we think you can work this off. One of the ways was to basically dispose of those units, train a few people, and, again, a lot of the tenants were women, young, single mothers who were able to get some job experience by ripping these units apart, salvage whatever you can, work off your arrears, half goes towards your arrears, half you get to take home. I think that’s an illustration of how you can work with LHOs and communities to pay down the rent.
I know Mr. Bromley has raised the issues of why couldn’t they shovel the sidewalks or basically cut wood for different people and find ways in our communities that you can work off your arrears than simply have arrears continue to build up, build up, build up. I think that’s the type of stuff that we have to work with with the LHOs of finding unique ways so we know there are high pockets of unemployment, there are people that are willing to work off these things.
One of the areas where I think we really have a good opportunity to do that is a lot of the retrofits and a lot of the work that has to be done locally in the summer months is a perfect chance to put some of these people that have arrears to work with
the idea that, okay, we’ll come to work, we’ll take half your pay, put it against your arrears, you get to take home the other half. That’s the type of stuff that we have to work on with the LHOs and the tenants so that they can show that, you know, we’ll work with you, you work with us, we’ll find solutions to our problems and bring down the arrears in our communities. Again, this is an illustration of how a community was able to do that. They’re basically out of the red now. They’re in the black. They’re doing good. Their collections are up and I think that’s what we want to see.
Again, I’d just like to pass that on to the Minister because I think that’s the type of stuff that we have to learn from, and more importantly, implement elsewhere. Thank you.