Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to thank the Member for Nahendeh for developing and asking me to consider seconding this. I’m very pleased to second the motion.

I’ve also looked at the seniors home repair initiatives that this Housing Corporation has put into our communities. It makes it quite difficult, even though the programs are there, for the seniors to apply to them and receive help. Sometimes they’re lucky, they can get the support. Sometimes they miss out because they don’t understand the applications or the process itself. It’s quite foreign to them. Some of them don’t understand the policies. There are some elders that are quite frustrated because of other issues that they’re unaware of or just the nature of living in small communities that prevent them from taking a step further in their application being accepted or looked at.

There were a lot of calls from my communities, especially Fort Good Hope where a lot of elders needed help. For example, the land issue of tenure becomes a real problem for the elders. When I go into the communities of the Sahtu and I go into Fort Good Hope, for example, they say we need our house fixed and Housing isn’t there. I explain to them that they need to put an application together and need to get that land tenure into MACA so that Housing can look at the application and go ahead. They give me quite a lecture on land and housing and when housing was first introduced into the communities.

If we could look at something that’s comprehensive, that seniors can go there and have one dedicated personnel from Housing Corporation just to work with the seniors, because right now we have the resources that work right across the board and sometimes we have personnel from the Housing Corporation that go into Deline. Sometimes the person doesn’t have a translator or interpreter with them. They go into the house and try to explain a program, as complex as we have them or as simple as we have them, to an elder that doesn’t quite understand English. So the elder nods his head or doesn’t quite know what’s going on. I have run into a few occasions in Deline where the Housing Corporation has gone into some of the homes there and the comments I hear back from the elders I say, well, did Housing come? They say, eh-heh. Did they talk to you? They say, eh-heh. What did you understand? They say, don’t know, they just went out. So there’s a real communication issue there with housing programs.

We need to take our time with these elders. The Sahtu has the highest core need in the region. I think that a seniors housing program can work. It takes a little more time with them and I think we

need to put it in a separate area where they can just look after seniors and work with seniors and help them out.

Some of the programs are only so much dollars in each community and it’s first-come first-serve sometimes. Sometimes some of the houses are well beyond the dollars that are dedicated for a program, so the department has to look at how much money can be spent there.

Just in closing, the one incident that it brings to mind right now is an elder in Fort Good Hope -- and the Minister is well aware of this -- is an elder that lived on the land, he was well in his 70s or 80s, he left for his family on the land and his house froze up. The Housing Corporation did go there, and there was nobody there. The elder came back to a frozen line, sewer. This was late December. He went to see the Housing Corporation and apparently the person that’s responsible for Fort Good Hope and that area went on holidays for a couple of weeks, so the elder had to live in his house without any running water or the use of a flush toilet. Things like that are nobody’s fault, it’s just how things have worked out.

I really think this government needs to put some emphasis on our seniors, on our elders, into the house and put a program like this. I support this motion 110 percent.