Thank you, Madam Chair. The Member’s first point there on the hot water tanks, I think we’ve got about 1,234 units in the thermal communities and about 90 of them are still on electric hot water, so we’re looking at opportunities to convert the rest of those. That’s 7.3 percent of the ones in the thermal communities. In the hydro communities we have 22 percent of our units that are still on electric. For the number of units we have, I think the fact that we have quite a number of them on oil fired and, again, always looking forward for opportunities to improve that.
The Member spoke on the K’atlodeeche Reserve. I mean, we’ve been working with them for a number of years now since I’ve taken over the portfolio. We had a number of vacant units there. I think we still have a number of vacant units there, but there’s an issue, again, of jurisdiction. I think the band had recently passed a band council resolution so that they’re able to give title to some of the land to their beneficiaries, I think, through a lease arrangement or something. They had to go through Canada for that, and I think they’ve got a band council resolution, is my understanding. Once they have that, there is opportunity for us to identify some homeownership clients, because as the Member knows, land tenure is one that’s part of the agreement, and if they’re able to get land tenure then we’re able to see those units be allocated if
there are eligible clients. If not, again, we’ll have to look at the fact that we may have to turn some of these over to public housing like we’ve done with a lot of other units across the Northwest Territories.
As far as local housing authorities go, some of the Member’s communities, I think, don’t have public housing units in the communities. I mean, we’re always willing to sit down with the community. I think the one community in particular, they’ve got three vacant units there. I’ve been to the community and I’ve heard their concerns with those three units. We are looking at turning those into a public housing unit so we can allocate them, because it’s not doing us any good and not doing the community any good to see all those vacant units. Again, I point out the fact we had 135 vacant units a couple years ago, some that were vacant for a number of years. We’ve managed to get that number down, and we’re still working on getting the number down even further.
There is opportunity there to enter into some kind of an agreement with the local government where they might be able to administer, or if they have the capacity they could even do the maintenance on these units because it saves us from having to send somebody into the community to provide maintenance. We’ve got a couple of agreements like that already in place with a couple more remote communities, which works well for them and works well for us.
We’re looking at ways we can work with the community to try and get those three units allocated and off the books.
As far as homeownership goes, ideally we’d like to see as many people in our homeownership programs as possible. We’ve tried every which way to get people into homeownership. We’ve expanded the criteria. We’ve expanded the income threshold so people that are making a little bit more can get into homeownership. What we’re very careful in doing now, and I think we’ve been guilty of this in the past, in our eagerness to try to get everybody into homeownership, we put some into homeownership that actually didn’t belong there and we set them up for failure. Many of them have quit claim to their units and they’ve gone back into public housing. That’s why with the HELP Program, it was supposed to be a bit of a transition from public housing into homeownership. You were given two years to see if you qualified or if you could make it as a homeowner.
Ideally, we’d like to see as many people as we can in homeownership but we have to do our due diligence to make sure that we’re not setting a lot of our people up for failure. We have been guilty of doing that in the past. We want to learn from those mistakes and make sure that we don’t do them again in the future. We’re starting to see that, as this next generation comes along, there is a lot
more work. We would like to see them get into homeownership. We will work with them any way we can. We have expanded the criteria on our programs quite a bit in the last couple of years to try to accommodate as many people as was possible. Thank you, Madam Chair.