Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to thank the honourable Member for Nahendeh for bringing this motion to the floor and having some discussion on it this afternoon. I have also been contacted by some people in the Sahtu region. I
didn’t quite understand the issue until I looked into it further.
Regarding the rent scale, I applaud the Minister. We have worked through the issue of how to reduce the cost of living in our smaller communities up in the Sahtu, of Fort Good Hope, Deline, Norman Wells and Tulita. Further north the cost of living is very high. Actually, I was up in Ulukhaktok. I couldn’t believe it. Minister Ramsay and I were up there at one time. We were walking through the store. We couldn’t believe the prices they were paying up there in Ulukhaktok, in terms of the Northern Store. It is just ridiculous. A box of Pampers we looked at – we took some pictures, actually – a box of Pampers in the Northern Store was well over $60 or $70. That is ridiculous for the cost of living in the Northwest Territories.
We know that Housing is putting a lot of money into accommodating single mothers, the parents. It is tough enough for them to survive even in Sachs Harbour. There was a study done that you had to make at least $90,000 a year just to make it by, just to have your head above the poverty line. That is ridiculous for the families in our small communities, single parents, where unemployment is sometimes 80 percent.
In Fort Good Hope the unemployment rate is about 80 percent. People are struggling. They get a child tax benefit that goes to help them with the children, with the family, the clothes, and yet they are being used as a means to calculate their rent through household income. That policy is from the federal government. We have made some efforts to change that in the past Assemblies, but we couldn’t get it. We couldn’t get to make that change because that is a federal government policy. We are following the federal government’s rules.
We have to, through this motion, do what we can to help the single mothers, the single families and the children in regard to this small benefit they get from the federal government and not have it included in the rental assessment.
One department does it; another department doesn’t. There is no consistency. I ask, through this Assembly, to take some serious consideration, look at the costs, look at the comparison and give that benefit to the young families in our smaller communities. It is very difficult. When we leave here and when we go back to our communities, we know the struggles that they go through and how hard it is to live in our small communities.
Like I said, I will ask the Members to think about this. Think about the children. Think about the families. Think about this issue here that we are bringing forward and ask the government if they would consider strongly to remove this from the NWT Housing Corporation policy and see if we can get some support. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.