Thank you, Mr. Chair. We appreciate the Member’s comments on the work that the NWT Housing Corporation is doing and we look forward to getting this project in Aklavik done. We are pleased that the community had chosen the same spot as the previous one, and having been there just recently, I see that one is down. I think we’re doing the work on the tender documents now and we’re hoping to have those out and have the contract awarded.

You talk about local employment in some of the smaller communities. A lot of the M and I work that the community does is an opportunity for employment, as far as some of the contracts go. Most of the contractors in the smaller communities now have proven that they do have the capacity to bid on a public tender and, in most cases, win it, because being from the community they have an advantage. I hear your concerns, though, about contractors coming from out of town, but at the same time, we want to make sure that we get a good price on our product and make sure we get our product on the ground in a timely manner, because we want to be able to have folks move into these places as quickly as possible. We continue to work on that though.

The waiting list in some of the communities, and I think one of the communities in your riding was identified, because we work closely with the NWT Teachers’ Association in trying to identify some of their communities where they feel that they have a lot of trouble getting teachers in there, for example, because I think they did a review of their housing situation in a lot of the communities working with our folks, and one of your communities was one of the ones that was identified as one of the communities to have challenges providing units to professionals that come in. We take that information and we use that as a guide to help us determine that, well, we should maybe get four units into this community and two units into that community and a few more over there, and that will alleviate some of the pressure. That was very valuable work that went on there.

The power outage that you had in McPherson, you talked about the wood stoves, and we like to see our homeowners with wood stoves because, you’re right, Mr. Blake, with the high cost of fuel and electricity and that and the fact that the power goes out, you need to have a backup. If the homeowner

wants to put a wood stove in their place, again, they would have to deal with the insurance issues on that.

You were talking about the power outage in Fort McPherson and the power plant burning down, and it was interesting how all that came about, because I was working in Inuvik, and they just happened to have a workshop in Inuvik where they brought all the maintenance workers from the communities into Inuvik and then the power plant burnt down, so all the boys were shipped from Inuvik. Well, they volunteered to go up there, and they spent a couple days up there just going from unit to unit running the generators and making sure that they had some heat. Unfortunately, the power plant burnt down, but at the same time, we had boys from some of the High Arctic communities that were in Inuvik that were up in McPherson assisting, so it was a real team effort not only from the residents of McPherson, who were pretty good, but from the Housing Corporation, and it just worked out that all our boys were in Inuvik at about the same time. That was a good news story there. I know in the housing office in Inuvik they still have the letters up from the Minister of the day commending them and all the other employees on the work that they did.

I think I’ve touched on a number of points that the Member raised. I hope I didn’t miss anything, Mr. Blake.