I would encourage most people to try to apply even if they don’t think the market is right, because they do have a length of time where they’re able to look for a unit. So if they were to get their application in right away.

Going back to the Member’s original question, though, it is part of the evaluation that we’re looking at and we see there may be some opportunity to maybe come back with a second intake for programs like PATH and that. Thank you.

Next I have Mr. Bromley.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to start off by asking just for clarification on the Apprenticeship Program. I don’t believe I have that quite right. I wonder if the Minister has the information handy on how many apprentices we have and are planning to have during this budget’s fiscal year and if we happen to know off hand what the current apprentices areas of expertise are.

Mr. McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We have 15 apprentices within the Housing Corporation and more specifically at the LHO level at this particular time. We do have plans for bringing on 10 more. As for the types of trades that they’re in, we have a fairly extensive list and what I can do is I can get the staff to provide a copy to Members that gives the location and specific trade they’re in. It goes from housing maintenance servicemen, which we find we need a lot in the communities, carpenters, oil burner mechanics, we have a few plumber/oil burner mechanic apprentices. That covers them all. We’ll be able to provide a list to Members of communities and specific trades.

That sounds great. I appreciate the Minister providing that information. I think this is a great program, as I’ve said before. We need to have these apprentices out in the communities where the need is greatest.

I want to follow up on the detail I sort of flagged in my general comments. There is $925,000 identified in ECE for creation of job opportunities in our communities, small and rural communities specifically. I am going to assume that there’s a pretty good match with our housing programs in the communities there. Again, I see this as an opportunity for the Minister to strike out in a new way to, in a cross-departmental approach, engage with this opportunity by providing some of the job opportunities which are a goal of ECE and I think this government as a whole within the context of public housing. There would be some challenges. I’m the first to admit in doing things a new way, they’re going to be front-line and have to do the policy work and explore what liabilities are and then deal with those liabilities, if any, and so on. I see a real opportunity, and many have. I think many of my colleagues and perhaps even the Minister has considered the opportunities we have in so many public housing clients who are unemployed but able bodied, to at the same time put them to work in a valuable way both to themselves and to society and to the goals of government, in this case both ECE and the Housing Corporation.

Could I get a commitment from the Minister to thoroughly explore and ideally identify and put in motion some action to start exploring and looking at the operational possibilities of this sort of new approach?

We’ve been very fortunate through the Rural and Remote Communities committee that they’ve identified some money for apprentices and we’ve been able to take some on and we’ve been able to retain them and add more on.

I take the Member’s point that as far as using able-bodied people in the communities. In some communities the LHOs have been very good at putting a lot of people in the community to work. You hear some cases where they’ve used them to maybe take apart an old building. I will commit to the Member that I’ll have discussions with my colleague, the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment, to explore possible ways that we can use the money that was identified through training, the $925,000 that the Member mentions. We’d be more than happy to use some of that money if we were able to bring on more apprentices and offer more training in the communities.

I see that throughout my travels in some of the communities where they do a lot of the local maintenance work themselves, the local renovation work themselves, and they bring on a lot of people

from in the communities. I know one community in particular had brought in a drywaller to teach some local people how to do the proper taping and painting. There are those opportunities, and I will commit that as a corporation, working in conjunction with ECE, we’ll explore all the possibilities we can to make sure we get a lot of our... I agree with the Member that we need to get our able-bodied people in the communities to work and if there are opportunities for us take a lead in that, then I’ll commit to that.

Again, I appreciate the Minister’s commitment there. I believe he does see opportunities there and kind of understands what I’m getting at here.

As I’ve said, I really support the Apprenticeship Program and I think we have opportunities that would sort of be a precursor to apprenticeship. It could be fairly modest maintenance programs for housing, ways to reduce housing costs. Like I mentioned, gathering wood for the distributed heating system and working with ENR, who is actually active putting distributed energy systems out there and so on, to deal with some of the costs that the Housing Corporation is carrying but in ways that serve our broader goals of educating and slowly building up skills and ultimately generating apprentices and so on. I think the Minister heard me and I appreciate that.

I guess my last question on this page, I notice quite a reduction under program delivery details in the order of 10 to 50 percent for most of the regions there. Am I correct in believing that this must be due to the reduced infrastructure program being planned for this year?

Mr. Anderson.

Thank you. Next I have Mr. Beaulieu, Mr. Yakeleya, Mr. Menicoche and Mr. Krutko. Mr. Beaulieu.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am just not sure if this is exactly the same question that Mr. Bromley asked, but I wanted to have a little more information on the reduction of CARE and CMHC repair programs. I recognize that maybe the CMHC repair programs are just simply not getting the money from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Overall, I notice that the CARE has gone from about $2 million to almost $4 million to over $8 million and back down to under about $5.6 million. I just want an explanation as to why the repair budget for homeownership was taken down that much.

Mr. McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We did have quite a spike in the amount. It went up to $8 million and that was as a result of some of the federal investment that we were using. It is down to $5 million. We are trying to refocus some of our resources into the repair side of it because we see that as one of our biggest needs right now. I think our overall infrastructure budget for this year is, like, $28 million. Yes, about $28 million. That’s going back to our historical levels that we’ve had before. So we’re trying to refocus some of our priorities into the CARE side of it.

I’m seeing a drop there. For the $8.5 million, does it look like this year for 2010-2011 ending March 31, 2011, if the entire $8.5 million will be spent on home repairs?

Mr. Anderson.

Does that include the CMHC programs? I’m wondering if those are aside from the overall reduction. I’m wondering if the CMHC money comes separately, as far as CMHC repair programs go, as indicated in this book.

Can the department or the Minister tell me if this reduction will impact people in the community trying to get repairs or if for the most part people applying for repairs are being approved? Provided that they’re eligible, of course. Will there be instances where people will be told that we can’t do your house because we don’t have enough money? That’s my question.

Mr. McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To give the Member some comfort, we do plan on allocating resources to all those who have been approved. If somebody is approved, they won’t have to worry about us telling them that we have no money.

Thank you. Next I have Mr. Yakeleya.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to ask the Minister about the monitoring and

delivering of programs in the communities or the housing needs in the communities. Is that also in the same category as being the needs of the people in the house? Is there someone from Housing going around to the elders in the communities to assess what type of household support they need?

I know there are a couple in my region that need bathrooms that would work for older people. They have some bathrooms that need to be adjusted for the elderly. I know that the Minister of Housing works with Health and Social Services, but they go into a house, they look at what’s needed and then, after that, nothing happens. I’ve been getting a couple of phone calls that this is the case with some of the older people who have a hard time with some of the household furniture in their houses. Is this a priority for housing, to fix some of these units up for our older people that are in our housing?