That’s good. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Committee, 5-56. Mr. Bromley.

Just very quickly, there is a very steady and seemingly steep drop in the CMHC repair programs. Could I just request an explanation on that once again? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. For that we’ll go to Mr. Stewart.

Page 5-56, NWT Housing Corporation, information item, programs and district operations, grants and contributions, contributions. Are there any questions?

Page 5-59, NWT Housing Corporation, information item, local housing organizations, operations expenditure summary. Mr. Blake.

Mr. Chair, I just wanted to ask the Minister if this included the forming of the housing board in Tsiigehtchic. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Blake. Minister McLeod.

Mr. Chair, it is a very consistent question for representatives from Tsiigehtchic and the Member for Mackenzie Delta. We have been waiting on the leadership in Tsiigehtchic to come to us and send us a letter saying they want to form a board. As far as I know, we haven’t received that yet. This has been an ongoing issue for two or three years now. They have a desire to form a board. We may need to get our district folks to follow up with them to see if a letter is forthcoming.

I was assured that the letter was sent, but I will double check and make sure of that. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Blake. I will take that as a comment. Mr. Bromley.

Mr. Chair, I’m just wondering where we’re at in response to recovering from the episode of moving ECE for a few years and now back under this Minister’s leadership. What is our debt situation and how are we doing with

collections? If I could just get an update on that area. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Minister McLeod.

Mr. Chair, I was hoping somebody would ask the question on collection rates because it is something that we’re quite proud of, not only for ourselves but the tenants out there. The collection rates have been doing really well. We have one region in particular, the Sahtu. I think their collection rate there is over 100 percent. It is 122 percent collection rate in the Sahtu. That indicates that folks are keeping up with their assessments and they are also putting money on what arrears that they may have.So the collection rates across the Northwest Territories have been going really well.

We did a lot of work after it was transferred back to the NWT Housing Corp from ECE. There were a lot of people that had huge arrears. So I think I’ve told Committee of the Whole before that we’ve gone pretty well to every LHO, worked with every client, and a number of balances were adjusted because it was just a matter of not reporting their income, it was a bunch of different issues, but we’ve done quite well with that, and again, I commend all the people out there.

We have a couple of communities where it’s still a bit of a challenge, but we are working with those communities to try and improve their collection rates, but overall I think we all should be very pleased with the collection rates in the communities. It indicates that people are starting to take a lot more responsibility for not only paying their rent, but the big problem was verifying their income and we seem to be going in the right direction. Thank you.

Thanks to the Minister for that good news. I think it would be useful if the Minister could provide an update to all of us really, probably in our respective ridings, on where we’re at. Maybe by community it would be useful for us to once again get on top of that. Just sort of a parallel question, if I could get a similar update of how our LHOs are doing knowing that those are related issues, but I know some of the LHOs have gone through real bottlenecks and difficulties with paying for utilities and so on and working within their budgets. If I could maybe get an update there. Thank you.

We will provide the list of collection rates by community for across the Northwest Territories. That way the Members that have the ones with the lower collection rates can go and encourage them to start living up to their responsibilities. The communities have been responding pretty good.

As far as the LHOs go, we have seven that have a small deficit, it’s probably our lowest number in the last six years. So they’re doing quite well. The ones that we find that we were running into some situations with, we worked very closely with them to try and get everything worked out. So it’s a work in progress and the LHOs are doing a much better job. Again, I keep going back to the new information system that we’re rolling out. We can, almost daily, check on how they’re doing and identify a problem before it gets too big and work with them to try and overcome that. Thank you.

Thank you. Again, it seems to be good news on that front, Mr. Chair. So thanks for that information. I guess my last follow-up on that would be, are there things in particular for those seven that are common across them that they need to focus on or that we should be aware of. Thank you.

Collection is probably one of the biggest ones because you find that the communities that have the lower collections are the ones that are having some trouble financially. Utilities might play a part in that because sometimes what you actually budget them for and what the utilities actually come in at, utility rates might rise. So that’s an issue. But collection, again, is one of the biggest ones. Thank you.

Thank you, Minister McLeod. Committee, we’re on 5-59, NWT Housing Corporation, information item, local housing organizations, operations expenditure summary. Any further questions?

Thank you. Page 5-60, NWT Housing Corporation, information item, local housing organizations, grants and contributions, contributions. Any questions?