Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I just wanted to add some context to the motion. I love our consensus-style government. This issue was raised by a young lady from Fort Simpson in July or August when she wanted to give her income statements to the Housing Corporation for public housing rent. She contacted me right away, as her MLA, and said, they started using my child tax benefit as income. She said she doesn’t understand. That money is for milk and pampers; it’s not for rent.
That is the whole purpose of our subsidy programs territorially and federally. It is about assisting those that need it. Here we have a case, because we made a change to our housing program, we are including it as income. Technically, that is clawing back a subsidy that eligible families are getting. That is just not right at all.
One of the goals of our 17th Assembly is about
reducing the cost of living. In this case, we are actually increasing the cost of living because we are using that little Child Tax Benefit and calling it income. Therefore, her rent would go up. That is inconsistent with the goals we as the Assembly set when we were elected in 2011. In fact, we should be lowering it.
With that, that just sets the context of this. It wasn’t there before. The corporation is not going to lose any revenue, because they weren’t getting any revenue off of it if anyway, so I say take it out and ask my colleagues on this side of the House to support me in asking the government to remove this one little thing to make life a little easier for our residents in the Northwest Territories. Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker.