Thank you, Mr. Chair. The comments I have, I could probably talk for two days on housing, but we only have a certain amount of time here. So I’m going to get right to the point.

The point is that we have a desperate need for good quality energy-efficient homes in our communities. We have people in our homes who are living in houses that were built in the late ‘70s, ‘80s that need attention in terms of the energy retrofits. I have gone to communities in the last month, during the winter, and the houses are not fit for the communities because they’re shifting in the ground and that, and the doors are not shutting properly. The furnaces are turned right up. Upstairs it’s hot, but downstairs it’s just cold. The floors are in pretty bad shape. These are some of the older units. So, Mr. Chair, the Minister and his staff are doing a lot of catch-up on a lot of these units.

The federal funding he talked about is declining. We are in a situation where the federal government is going to cut us off from housing, social housing in 2038. Yet we have a lot of our people that depend on these units. There are a number of people in the tons of e-mails here that show that they do not qualify for the programs. You either make too much or you make too little. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t kind of situation with the people. So we have empty units in our

communities. The Minister knows about this. I’ve taken Minister Beaulieu and Minister Abernethy to Colville Lake and we have seen those empty units in Colville Lake for the last three years. Nobody can apply for them. Same with in Deline. The Minister has provided me with some information and I appreciate it. There’s been 23 units that are under repair. I’ve gone back there the last month and these units are still sitting empty and people are still living with other people for over a year.

So we have a real crisis in our communities. These units are empty; we can’t get them in for some odd reason. Our programs do not quite make it for them to get in. They’ve either got bad credit, arrears, a whole gamut of reasons why we can’t get a family into it and they’re still sitting empty. I think I can ask the Minister to look right across the Northwest Territories. You will see how many empty units are boarded up, people not getting in them. There is something not right for us.

The Minister made his opening comments. There are some things in there that I liked what the Minister said. The first time I hear the Minister talking about the Small Community Homeless Program. If we are going to start charging rent to elders, we are probably going to have some homeless elders, based on income support and household income. We are finally getting a Homeless Fund for small communities. There are 27 small communities. We are going to spend $300,000 in our communities. There are six market communities. We need help in our small communities.

The Minister has some programs here that I think he is making some changes to the way we do our business with housing. I want to say that the one biggest one that I am going to put up a fight is the charging of the rent for the seniors. I don’t think we need to do that. We are taking $300,000. This government here is going to be charging rent to the seniors. They say it is $80 or $90, but it is household income. In the future, the elders are going to have difficulty paying their rent.

We had a meeting with the NWT Seniors’ Society. They told us about this. The NWT Seniors’ Society represents the seniors. They told us that they needed more time. The way they explained it is that they should have met and talked with them and consulted with them and talked to the elders in the Sahtu. Housing should have been talking to them and this is what they want to do. How can we work this out together?

I’m glad the Minister made some changes to the employment, because that is what we talked about. That is what my constituents talked about, an incentive for young people to go to work and not be hit with skyrocketing rent once they get a job and then it goes back down. That is what we talked about. We did not talk about elders being charged

rent, not from my side. I don’t know who in the district or in headquarters said let’s do this and let’s push it through. Not the Seniors’ Society because they told us that is not done by them. They did not support it. They gave us a letter saying delay it, do an analysis. This government here is willing to do that, to charge seniors rent. That is what should be known before the implementation goes through, all good things that you are going to be doing. We the 17

th that is charging elders rent for what, $300,000?

You could find some money. We can find it together. Leave them alone.

This one here – there are good things you did in housing – but this one here bugs me. I go back to the community and say why they are charging this. Even the Seniors’ Society said that. They do not agree with this government so much that they didn’t even take your guys’ money, the $20,000. They refuse to take it on principle. You give them $20,000 for a contribution and they told us they didn’t take it. That is serious stuff. So for myself, I said we could do a lot of good things, but this one, this one bothers me. It bothers my people; it bothers the elders that I represent. We should delay it, look at it, go back and talk to my elders. You’re pushing this one down. You’re pushing this implementation, this policy. You’re pushing it down the elders’ throats. They never discussed it. Talk with us.

So for me, Mr. Chair, when I go back to my region and I talk to the elders, they have told me is people are not very happy. This is the government that’s going to do this to the elders. We need to sit and talk about it a little more.

For $325,000 or $35,000, I don’t know where your thinking is at.