Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We respect the intent of this motion. However, we have made a number of changes over the last number of years, I think, that made it a lot easier for those that are struggling to maintain their residence.
Somebody talked about making life easier. I think we’ve done that. Somebody mentioned a single
mother and we use the example of a single mother who’s working, under the old system she was paying close to $900. Under the new system she’s paying just over $300, so that’s a significant savings that she could apply back to putting food on the table for her family. So we have made a lot of progress as far as that goes.
We can make an argument that all other types of income should not be included and that’s the reason why we got into the shotgun approach rent scale that we had before where we had 442 different rents. Now we have, probably, 22. This makes it fairly consistent for all people and the reception out there has been very good.
The Members talk about the inconsistencies of the programs offered by the government, and we have some programs in the Housing Corp where we don’t assess particular incomes that may be assessed somewhere else. There is a point there that we may have to have a look at. As far as the Housing Corporation goes, I think we`ve made a lot of changes and we continue to make changes that benefit people.
One of the things we’ve made a commitment to doing – and I`ve had this discussion with committee – is we try to stay out of the day-to-day financial lives of our tenants. Before, anything, if you made a bingo, that would be assessed and that’s why we got into the trouble we were in. So we decided to stay out of that and make the rents very consistent. You know from up to a certain amount that you’re only going to be paying this set amount of rent and I think it’s been well received out there.
Again, we respect the intent of the motion and we hear where Members are coming from. If we start making exemptions for all other income, we’ll get back to the place that we were in before. I know folks out there are not going to be too pleased with that.
Mr. Speaker, because this is direction to Cabinet, we will be abstaining from the vote. Thank you.