Thank you, Mr. Chair. As part of the Member’s first question on public housing purchase, that is going to be part of the PATH program now providing assistance to homeownership, so they’ll be able to access that program to purchase a public housing unit. We’re actually thinking of approaching some of the public housing clients that have been there and been good tenants and keep the rent up to date for a long time. We’re actually considering approaching them to see if they would be interested. So, the work is ongoing in that.

The operating deficits, we do have a number of communities that are running a deficit right now, but we’re working closely with the communities and we think that with the new program that we’re able to monitor the activities of the LHOs. If there are any red flags, we should be able to pick those up right away.

When we appear before committee next year, I think this is being implemented on April 1st , if I’m

not mistaken, we’re doing all the preliminary work right now, so we’ll able to monitor and have some real time data and be kept up to date on those.

The rent collections, I have to say the numbers have improved considerably. There are a number of LHOs that are over 100 percent, which means that they’re collecting the rent that was assessed plus a lot of people are putting money on their arrears. I think our highest one in the latest fact sheet I have is at 173 percent, so that’s a good indication. Unfortunately, we still have some communities that are quite low, and we’re working on those communities. We keep Members up to date on any potential evictions that might be happening in their riding and you may be hearing from certain individuals who are being evicted because of not paying their rent.

The rent supplement access, the Member is correct; we’ve got 150 units that we’re funded for. I think we had 100 and then we had 20 of them, I think, that have moved on, which I guess in a way is a good thing. We’ve had some public meetings and we’re trying to communicate the fact that we have this option that’s available to them, and word of mouth is sometimes the best advertising. We’ve had people approaching us saying we know about the program. I believe there were a couple ads in the paper. But we are communicating it to the public, we’re working on that and we are anticipating that we should be able to pick up more clients in this particular program.

The legal action on the mortgages, I think we’ve got about 30 clients that they’re over at the lawyer’s office right now. We want to move on these clients, because they have been given a fantastic opportunity, as I said in my opening comments, to come in and redo their mortgage balance. For one reason or another, they decided not to take us up on that and continued with their own mortgage, which with many of them we’re still in arrears and they just haven’t paid since then, so they really have left us with no choice but to proceed with legal action because it’s unfair to a lot of those people that are paying on time and have been paying on time for a number of years.

Hot water tanks, we have 90, I believe, that are left out of 2,400 units. I think the replacement of these electric hot water tanks is still ongoing through the M and I, Modernization and Improvement Program. As a unit is getting some work done, I think in my

opening comments I mentioned we had 216 we are hoping to do, so any of the units that we’re doing the major retrofits on, we will be replacing the hot water tanks on there. Again, as we come before committee next year, those numbers should improve significantly. We have regular briefings with committee, so as we replace out the hot water tanks, we’ll be giving committee an update on the number we have left.

Utility costs, the tracking is an area that we have had some concerns with again. With the new program that we have in place, we will be able to capture their utility costs very quickly. I believe we are working with the utility providers and they’re going to do an electronic transfer of the usage from all our clients. Again, with the major retrofits we have, we’d like to see that number come down. Obviously there are some things we can’t control, but there are some things that we can and that’s what we’re working on. But with the new program we have in place, I think we’ll be able to track all of the usages in the communities a lot closer. Again, that will be a valuable tool for us. If we see a unit in a particular community that has extremely high utility costs consistently, then we know that’s one of the units that we may have to consider doing a major retrofit on.

I believe I’ve touched on all the points the Member has raised. Thank you, Mr. Chair.