Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have a few comments. I have a couple of questions. More concerns, I guess, than questions particularly. I would like to echo my colleague’s comment earlier about the good work that the Housing Corporation has been doing. Two things, in my mind: One, they’ve been keeping Members updated, as the Minister mentioned a little while ago, and when we are updated and we have information, then that lets us know what’s going on and certainly keeps us much happier. We don’t get cranky that way. I think the changes to the programs that the Housing Corporation has instituted seem to be working out well.

I’m really pleased to hear the words “housing continuum.” They appeared in the Minister‘s opening remarks, and they are used relatively often when the Minister and his officials come to meet with committee, and I’m really pleased because I think that’s something that was lacking previously, so it now seems to be part of the language of the Housing Corporation and I’m very glad to hear that. We do have to cover our residents from absolute homelessness through…birth to death, basically, kind of thing.

I do notice there’s a significant increase in the budget, about $20.7 million if I did the math correctly. I think I understand where the additions are coming from or what the additions are for, but I did wonder, as I looked at those numbers, whether or not the Housing Corporation is going to have the capacity to be able to accomplish everything they want to accomplish in this next budget year. There are always carry-overs from one year to the next and I don’t know what the amount of carry-overs are for ’13-14, but I just wonder if the corporation

has considered the amount of work that is going to be required in budget year ’14-15 and do they feel confident that they’ll be able to get it done. I think all of us have seen piles of crates in communities waiting for houses to be built and that’s not something that is of benefit to our residents. It’s just a general sort of concern as we do have the capacity within the corporation to handle both carry-overs and what we’ve got on the books for this next budget year.

I’m really pleased to have seen an increase in the Homelessness Fund. It’s a little more than doubled and I think that’s great. I heard the Minister mention Shelter Capital Fund, so I presume that’s what the increased money is for, but I would like to hear from the Minister what the extra $358,000 is intended for.

On the subject of homelessness and shelters, I have questioned the Minister on this before, but I am concerned that we have shelters, particularly in the city of Yellowknife, where there is an issue of capacity for staff. There are no standards for shelters, and in response to my query the Minister indicated that we have legislation in place which should handle anything that NGOs would be required to do to operate an emergency shelter or a homelessness shelter. I don’t think that’s where I’m going.

We do have standards for our shelters that deal with women and families escaping family violence, and that’s the sort of standards that I’m looking for are the standards that apply to our family violence shelters should also apply, in my mind, to homelessness shelters. At the moment, we have situations where we have one staff person overnight for 40 to 50 people, and we would never see that in any government operation. We wouldn’t allow that. The union wouldn’t allow it. My point is I don’t think that we should be allowing that in our NGOs. We all know NGOs don’t have a lot of money so they staff what they can to whatever limits that they can, and I would suggest if we had standards in place, that would force them to hire more staff. It would force us, hopefully, to provide them with more funding so they could hire more staff. I just raised that as a concern and I would hope that maybe the Minister might change his mind if he thinks about it a little bit, or maybe we have a conversation.

The Transitional Rent Supplement Program has been mentioned, and I agree with – I think it was Mr. Dolynny who mentioned it – it’s a good program. I am still concerned, though, and I’ve mentioned this before, that I wish the rent supplement could apply to people who are in transitional housing, and I’m speaking particularly of transitional housing that the YWCA operates. There are a lot of people there who are coming directly from homelessness into some sort of a small home

of their own. Generally, if they do that they have absolutely no income or at least they start with no income, and they certainly could use the rent supplement.

Lastly, just in general terms, we have made – we, the royal we, the government – the Housing Corporation has made a number of changes to programs. We’ve initiated new programs and we’ve made changes to old programs. I would like to know what we are doing to evaluate them. Some of them are really recent, but some of them have been ongoing for close to a year now, and I know oftentimes the government says, well, we’re going to wait three years and we’ll evaluate after three years, but I think that’s too long a time period. I think we ought to at least do an interim evaluation after six months to a year and get a sense whether or not something is working. I think the Housing Corporation is doing that, but I would like to be reassured that they are.

That’s all I have. Thank you very much.