Thank you, Mr. Chair. I thank the Member for the concerns that she’s raised. When she talks about the capacity, I believe the Housing Corporation has demonstrated that they do have the capacity, and I use the example of all the money we got for the Affordable Housing Initiative a few years ago, and we had to get all those projects on the ground. I think it was quite a task for a couple years and we managed to get all the units on the ground. I think we’re one of the only jurisdictions in the country that was able to use all the money and match all the money. We had to deal with the problem of vacant units afterwards, but we wanted to make sure that we got the product on the ground to access the money that was made by the federal government. I believe we do have the capacity.
In ’13-14, I think we’re on track to have 90 percent of our capital projects completed. Our carry-overs, I think, are getting smaller and smaller every year, so we’ve been fortunate that we’ve been able to get most of our capital on the ground, and it’s our goal to make sure that we get our capital on the ground, because the longer we delay then the longer people have to wait for these particular units.
The Homelessness Fund, the hard to house, I believe we had $280,000 that was earmarked for that. The Shelter Capital Fund, we have earmarked $100,000 for that. Now, that’s to go to help the NGOs with some repairs that might be needed. It’s application based, so again, it’s a new one and we’ll see how that rolls out.
As far as evaluating our programs, I believe we have an ongoing evaluation of our programs. I think Members are well aware in the last few years we’ve
made a lot of changes, and a lot of changes we made on the fly when we realized that maybe this can work better or we can improve in this area, so rather than wait three years to say we need to improve this, we tried to initiate those improvements right away. We’ve had a number of changes to our programs over the last number of years.
The transitional rent supplement, the Member spoke to one area in particular which is basically getting a building that is free, on top of getting some money from the Housing Corporation to assist with the O and M. This was specifically earmarked for those that are going into market housing and had to pay the market rate and it was a struggle for a lot of them. This program was mostly designed for them. I think it’s working quite well. I’ve had some comments come back.
I will have Mr. Stewart touch on the standards if you don’t mind, Mr. Chair.