Thank you, Mr. Chair. I also have found some very good and positive changes in the Housing Corporation, which I appreciate. I know the Minister has excellent staff. I like to share the credit and think that committee has also contributed. In fact, he has staff who listen well and he himself listens well and reacts positively. I think working as a team, big stuff can happen.
I have a number of questions just on the energy front, and I know that’s always an ongoing challenge of putting in some better monitoring to see what the effectiveness of our actions are and stuff like that, which I appreciate.
Heat and power costs I see are up by another $1 million this year in this budget, so there’s obviously still room for improvement. We’d like to see those go down, moving to renewables and energy efficiency. Specifically, I know solar water heating is a demonstrated technology. I know our solar plan seems to emphasize, almost exclusively, electricity, but some of our biggest gains have been made through the water heating and, in fact, solar water heating. In fact, I know that the Minister has staff with expertise and enthusiasm on this I think in Hay River. I think that’s an untapped resource that the Housing Corporation could be thinking about there. Would the Minister look into that?
He mentioned, I think in response to my colleague Mr. Dolynny, the question on hot water heaters. We have about 90 electric hot water heaters right now and I think the key question is what did we have
last year at this time, so if the Minister has access to that information, that would be a clear indication of progress.
On the housing for devolution, it’s tough for our communities – the professionals, housing, teachers, health professionals and so on, and now with devolution and decentralization – so I recognize there’s an issue there. The government is putting substantial money into that. Can the Minister give me assurance that this is not detracting from providing housing to those members of the public that need housing in a more serious way? They don’t have a job that takes them into the community, for example. This is market housing. Obviously, there’s no such thing in small communities, so I’m wondering: does that mean they will actually be paying the costs of this and that we will be recovering the costs of this housing?
The next area I have questions are in my constituency work I found that there are often differences between support programs in Education, Culture and Employment versus the Housing Corporation. One example that I’d like to see is the Housing Corporation change their policy – and I’ll be raising a reverse situation with ECE later – is children as dependents. ECE is satisfied that children are dependents whether or not they’re adopted. If in fact, in reality, they are the people who are the guardians and caregivers for our children, they don’t have to be adopted. The best example is quite frequently in our Aboriginal cultures, of course, are grandparents. When they’re looking after children, the Housing Corp refuses to acknowledge the number of children unless they’re adopted, unlike ECE which does acknowledge them. This is problematic, so if I can ask the Minister to look into this and hopefully revise the policy so that they’re in line. These are the sorts of things we’re hoping to get through the Anti-Poverty Strategy and so on, but this cross-departmental stuff is just tough to do, so I’m trying to raise some very specific examples.
Another issue that I’ve come across is the way people are prioritized for public housing, specifically people in transitional housing versus the homeless. Right now people in transitional housing are put on some… They’re not even put on a list, as far as I know. They’re supposed to be put on the list for housing. Often the transitional housing is inappropriate. It’s sort of an emergency basis. Here’s something transitional. Meanwhile, they’ll sit there and sit there and sit there, but somebody homeless will say I need a house and they’ll get the house. What would you expect to happen? Well, in fact it does. These families are making themselves homeless so that they can get on the darn list for public housing, and putting their families at risk. I’ve had this happen repeatedly with my constituents, families that are split up and couch surfing, camping in less than secure situations and so on. If
we’re putting people in transitional housing, let’s make them a priority for getting them into housing and prevent them having to make themselves homeless because they can’t take it anymore, because they’re not in appropriate housing, in order to try to get on the list.
I think another opportunity, and I know this department does listen and does try and deal with these. I am hopeful on this stuff.
There are still a few remnant issues from the days of ECE looking after public housing subsidies and they are remnants. I think the department has done a good job in dealing with the bulk of things, but nevertheless, there are remnant issues out there where, for example, clients or previous clients were inappropriately assessed where they did not take the paperwork that was given them and deal with it appropriately, or where the family moved out of public housing and it wasn’t recorded so they continued to be assessed at full cost now because there wasn’t any communication. These are wearer issues and remnant and historical. Often the paperwork is not there.
Now, I have been successful at getting some adjustments where paperwork does exist, but there are cases now where the paperwork doesn’t exist, but there’s a record of not taking appropriate action and being accurate by the Housing Corporation. That’s admitted where their people delivered, not necessarily Housing Corporation staff but the LHO. So again, an issue that could use some resolution. We’ve been doing major things to resolve these things in a big way, a systemic way. So this is clean-up stuff.
The last thing I wanted to mention was the apprentices that the Housing Corporation has. It has been a program I’ve always supported, always expressed an interest in, always appreciated information on it. If, once again, we could get an annual sort of report on where we’re at with apprentices, how many we have in what trades and specifically what’s happened to the ones that have sort of graduated out of the system and become full-fledged journeyman or whatever. I also notice a specific budget now, I think $127,000, a one-off thing perhaps or the start of a new program. I wouldn’t mind hearing a little bit about that. Thank you.