Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’d just like to thank the Minister and the department for reinstating the funding under the housing for staff. I know it was supposed to be taken out of the budget for this year, but I know through the business planning process we asked the Minister to reinstate that. I would just like to thank the Minister and department for doing that. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Blake. Minister McLeod.

I’ll thank the Member very much for his comments, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Minister McLeod. Thank you, Mr. Blake. Any further

questions, Mr. Blake? Thank you. Moving on with questions on this page I have Ms. Bisaro.

Thanks, Mr. Chair. I wanted to ask a question on the housing for staff item as well. This was tried a number of years ago and it wasn’t really successful, so what is the corporation doing different this time around to try and get a better buy-in from communities to provide housing for professional staff? Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Minister McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We are increasing the amount of incentive we’re offering to local developers. As well, I think we’re going to be building some of these units ourselves. We’re working very closely – we just had a meeting recently – with the NWTTA. They’re doing, I think, a survey on the communities and what their needs are. So we’re working very closely with them so we can identify the communities that they may identify and we may identify as those in most need. Thank you.

Thanks to the Minister. Good to hear that. I’ll look forward to an update in a year’s time and see how well this particular strategy worked.

I wanted to also ask about homelessness. I can’t let the Minister go through a budget without asking about homelessness. There is $325,000 there. It supports two programs and I hope by now that we have a homelessness coordinator, which the corporation was going to hire, to run these programs but I think also to look at what needs to be done with regard to homelessness in a larger sense.

I did note that the Minister, somewhere in here in his remarks, talked about the housing continuum from homelessness to home ownership, and I’m pleased to see that the corporation is now recognizing that we do have the continuum of housing that does include homelessness. I don’t think that wording was there before, so I’m really pleased to see that.

My question here really is: Do we have a homelessness coordinator hired at this point, and is there any hope that in the 2014-15 budget year we will have a bigger budget for homelessness? Thank you.

We’re just doing the interviews right now, so we’re hoping to have our homelessness coordinator on soon. As far as having a bigger budget for next year, we have to go through the budget planning cycle. We have to work with committee, and if there are opportunities there to put a little more money in this, it would have to be one that’s made with the agreement of committee and Cabinet. Thank you.

Thanks to the Minister. It’s been a long time coming, this coordinator position, but I’m glad we’re at the interview stage. That’s progress.

The other question I wanted to ask on this page has to do with the Transitional Rent Supplement Program. I know it’s a new program. It’s, presumably, been in place for a year. I think it was initiated in this current budget year. I don’t remember exactly which month, what time of year, but I’d like to know from the Minister when enough time would have passed when we could get some kind of an update on the success or failure of this program. Thank you.

It was implemented September 1st and our goal was to go to 175 and

we’re going to phase them in. I think we’ve got 50 this year. Thank you.

Thanks to the Minister. So to the question of when an evaluation might be done with some kind of an update back to Members. Thank you.

As far as an evaluation, I think an ongoing evaluation and giving committee regular updates on how it’s working so far. The fact that we’ve got 50 families out there we’ve been able to help I think is a pretty good indication of how well this is probably going to work. Once we get it fully implemented, we’d be more than happy to provide committee with an update on how well it is working. Thank you.

That’s great. Thanks to the Minister. That’s all I have, Mr. Chair. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Moving on with questions I have Mr. Bromley.

Thanks, Mr. Chair. I’m just wondering, there seems to be a bit of a de-emphasis on Homeownership Entry Level Program funding and maybe a re-emphasis on the Market Housing Program. Could I just get the reasoning for those adjustments?

Thank you, Mr. Chair. If you recall in the past, we did put a lot of HELP units on the ground. A lot of these HELP units in the communities were vacant because we didn’t have clients for them. I think we built a lot of them on specs that we were going to get the clients and it didn’t work out the way we had hoped, so our plan now is to… First of all, we’re not getting as many applications and clients approved as we would like, so we’ve turned a lot of these units into public housing and we’ve turned some into staff housing, we’ve rented them out wherever we can. So we realize that we may need to scale back a bit on the HELP program and put more emphasis on the other programs. That’s the reason that you see it come

down a bit. Instead of building on spec and having units sitting empty, we’ll try to build where they’re most needed. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Mr. Moses.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just following up on the homelessness initiatives, I just want to ask the Minister if there was any funding moving forward for the day shelter that we have in Inuvik to try to keep its doors open longer during the winter months when it does get pretty cold out there, and the people who are accessing the day shelter are having to leave the day shelter because they can’t operate it during the day because they don’t have the funding. I just want to ask if there are any dollars that would be allocated so the doors could be open, specifically during the winter months when it’s cold outside. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Moses. Minister McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The new homeless shelter did get some money to operate the program out of there. As far as the exact amount, it’s not on here but they did receive some money to operate a soup kitchen. Thank you.

Would the Minister be willing to look at the dollars that were allocated and rather than just the O and M costs, be looking at providing more funding, specifically over the winter months when these guys are accessing the day shelter so they are able to spend the days in the day shelter, so they can keep their doors open. Thanks, Mr. Chair.

A lot of the programs, and most of the ones that were approved, were applications that we had received from these groups and we reviewed all the applications and disbursed the funding. We work with them and will probably get an application in. Thank you.