Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. I just want to speak about the vacancy rates throughout the Northwest Territories and particularly my riding of Nahendeh. There is some recent documentation, I believe my colleague Mr. Bromley received, that shows that there's a 32 percent vacancy rate in our home ownership units throughout the Northwest Territories. That means that one out of every three homes that we’ve built remains empty. With respect to my constituency of Nahendeh, the vacancy rate is actually 25 percent, so one out of four homes that we built in Nahendeh remains empty to this day.

Especially with the riding that has the highest core need in the most recent Housing Needs Survey that we had, I think some of the solutions that we had in the past was having a community liaison worker in each of the communities as a part-time position. I believe that this will go a long ways; it did in the past. Whereas, if the community liaison worker is in the community addressing and working with the clients there, I know that as I’ve travelled to my communities, often when the regional staff make visits, they’re doing their best at making visits, their clients are out of town travelling and they miss their appointments. So they’re often asking me, when is Housing coming. I say, well, they were just here last week. They say, well, they didn’t know about it. However, a liaison worker will know this, will work with the clients; in fact, maybe even upping the number of applications that the corporation receives.

I would like to urge the Minister to look at the past practice, because we do want to house people. It’s a shame in the communities that I visit, there are empty houses and people are in need, and they’re seeing empty houses. I know the Minister has a strategy and I’d like to ask some questions during the appropriate time. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.