Thank you, Minister McLeod. Anything further, Mr. Moses?

No, nothing further. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you. Next I have Ms. Bisaro, followed by Mr. Bromley.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. My comments are quite similar to those of my colleagues, but as I’ve said before, I think they bear repeating.

I too am pleased with the work that the Housing Corporation has done over the last number of years. There have been a number of changes that have been made. I like to think that the Housing

Corp is thinking beyond the box a bit, that they are analyzing where need is and they’re responding to that need. I think the changes have been very positive on certainly the government but also, I think, on the people that are in public housing and the people that are administrating public housing, our local housing authorities.

I am also really pleased to see that the Housing Corp is focusing more and more on green works. We’ve got voltaic systems; we’ve got pellet boilers and so on, and it seems to be a bit more of a focus every year and I’m very glad to see that. I think it’s only going to prove beneficial in terms of efficiencies. Efficiencies, in my mind, are going to lower costs, and we certainly need to lower our costs because of our declining federal funding.

I only really have two main concerns and they apply particularly to my community, but they certainly apply, as well, to every community in the North. The one is the cap that we have at the moment on public housing units in our communities. Yellowknife I think particularly Yellowknife’s single people are in a particularly difficult situation with the cap on our public housing facilities. As a single person you can get on a housing list, but you’re going to stay there for years and years and years. I don’t think there are single people who are in desperate need of housing who ever move from maybe 30 or 35 people on the wait-list. So we need more public housing in general, but I think in Yellowknife particularly we need to look at public housing for single people, and I would encourage the Housing Corp to look again outside the box and consider something innovative but that is going to be relatively cheap but also to serve the needs of our single people in Yellowknife. It’s an issue in other communities; we’ve heard that from Members. There’s also the issue about just the need for more public housing units period, but I want to emphasize that we need units for our singles.

The other major concern for me is seniors housing. We have, and I’m not sure if we’ve had the numbers out there, but certainly there have been several studies that have been done in the last number or months or certainly over the last year, which indicate a huge increase in the number of seniors in the NWT. That number is going to increase, I think, 100 percent to 150 percent across the NWT, but in Yellowknife that number is liable to increase three times, 300 percent. We need to, whether it’s the Housing Corp or whether it’s the Housing Corp in conjunction with other departments, we need to not look into this but start to make some progress on this problem. By that I mean providing some sort of housing for our seniors. We have a fair amount of housing already, I appreciate that, but where I’m more concerned is the lack of housing and it’s going to be even worse as the years go by for seniors who can no longer

stay in their home. I support the concept of Aging in Place. It’s something that I think is very valuable and I think most seniors, most elders if they can, if they’re still physically able, if they’re mentally capable, want to stay in their own home and they want to stay there as long as they possibly can, but there comes a point in time when they can no longer stay in their own home for one reason or another. At that point they need to be put into a housing situation where they have professional care where they have people who can look after them. There’s graduated elements of that care. Some people need more care than others, but we do not have in the NWT, and particularly in Yellowknife, we do not have that space available now, particularly for seniors who need to be looked after, so to speak, and who can’t stay in their own home.

It would be something that I really strongly encourage the Housing Corporation to act on yesterday. I was going to say sooner than later, but this is something which is an urgent need and needs to be actioned as soon as possible.

Certainly, the organization in Yellowknife, the Avens Society or the Avens Group, they have put a great deal of housing in place for Yellowknife seniors, but it also serves NWT seniors as well. Aven Manor and Aven Cottages are not just for Yellowknife members. If they are residents, they serve residents across the territory. Both of those facilities are full and both of those facilities have very long wait-lists.

I think I have stressed it twice already and I’m going to stress it again, Mr. Chair, seniors housing for those who can no longer look after themselves is an urgent need, and I hope the corporation will work with other departments to get it done. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Minister McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the Member’s comments on the work that the NWT Housing Corporation is doing. I heard her say she is pleased with the work we are doing. We appreciate that. Again, we work with the committee very closely.

The Member was talking about singles units. It is a challenge and that’s a direction that we are going to have to go, is give more towards singles. In some of the larger communities, especially the market communities, if we were to come and put 20 or 30 units on the ground, I think we would hear from the business community, and we don’t want to do that.

One of the ways we try to alleviate that is through the Territorial Rent Supplement Program, where singles, if they can get into a unit, we will help subsidize their rent. I think the uptake on that has been fairly consistent, not as much as we… We’re

at 90 percent right now, so there is still some room there.

The seniors in place, we recognize that it is going to be a challenge. I think that is one of the reasons that we are trying to get some of the seniors units into some of the communities. In all of the seniors homes that we are doing, we have designed them so that if we work with Health and Social Services, all the infrastructure is there for them to run their programs. It was in a particular unit in Aklavik I think. So we work with them. We will provide the infrastructure. We will make sure it’s built into the units so if they come back and say, well, we would like to provide these services, then the infrastructure is already there, which is a huge cost savings.

In public housing, we hear there is a huge need for public housing across the Northwest Territories. We hear we need more units in each community. We have been trying to take off some of the pressure by having all of the homeownership units, and again, as I said to one of my colleagues before, there is always going to be a need for social housing. We have 2,300, I believe, public housing units across the Northwest Territories. We have, with the affordable housing, about 350 affordable housing, plus we have some other third-party interests where we are actually leasing space from developers and then in turn renting it out. So it is a challenge. We are challenged again with the declining funding. That is why, with some of the initiatives that we are taking on, the green initiatives, as the Member pointed out, are helping us, I think, to deal with some of those issues and those cost pressures.

As well, and I have to point out and I should have pointed out earlier, we are actually seeing our rental revenue increasing. It is a significant achievement, I think, just to see the revenue increasing, and the assessments and the collection rates are all increasing. To me, that is a great indication that people across the Northwest Territories are starting to take their commitments seriously. There are consequences if they don’t and I think they recognize that. So we are quite pleased about that. Again, if they continue to keep up with their rent and everything and our revenue is increasing, that takes some of the additional pressure off the NWT Housing Corporation and this Assembly. We were fortunate last year, I think during the O and M budget, that we were given an additional $1.2 million from the Assembly to deal with some of the pressures of the money we were losing from CMHC.

All of these, I think, are part of our overall strategy to deal with some of the pressures that we are facing from the declining funding. Again, I have to commend people, our clients out there, for starting

to step up to the plate and accepting their responsibilities. I think that’s huge.

In the Avens, I believe we made an initial investment into the actual infrastructure plus we provide an additional, on top of that, $540,000 a year to help with the O and M of that. Again, we recognize that we are open to any kind of… As I said before, we’re flexible. We are open to any kind of partnerships that we can provide. I think we have proven in some of the construction, we provide some money to help with the construction of the infrastructure. The O and M is normally left up to the group that’s operating, but we do what we can to make a contribution to the infrastructure that is being built because we recognize that it helps identify and deal with a need within the territory and one that is going to continue to grow as the population gets older. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Minister McLeod. Next on my list I have Mr. Bromley.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate this opportunity. Again, please forgive any overlap. I would like to start by just joining in on this love fest a little bit. I don’t want to be left out. I know the Minister is not used to these words, but all kidding aside, I think this department has really shown some progressive work and move to really tackle the issues. I think there has also been a happy coincidence with the return of housing to its proper home that has helped with collections and so on. I know the Minister fought hard for that under another hat. I think that has been a little bit enabling for some of the collection side of things.

Having said that, housing is a big issue for my constituency, and not just my constituency, for Yellowknife. I don’t want to go into too much detail. I think Ms. Bisaro and others probably have named this, but we have long waiting lists. The turnover is very slow, YWCA and so on. This is a real issue in Yellowknife. Partly, as the Minister knows, I talked a lot about this, income support to access housing doesn’t do it. It simply doesn’t do it. We need public housing. I would ask the Minister to look at that, because I think we can gain for the government. I think the public housing can be more efficient and effective to reduce costs as compared to trying to do it through income support. I have made a number of statements and so on and I know the Minister has access to those.

I thought it might be interesting to get an update on where we are at with the CMHC loan business. I think 2037 is D Day or something, and were there any signs of weakness in the federal government – I expect not – on playing a role in the national housing.

I heard the Minister’s comment on the old, disused units in communities, and I know the communities would probably regard those as liabilities, and given the hazardous materials, I would suspect the

Minister thinks that’s a real liability and something we don’t want out there, knowing how children get into houses and play around and stuff. I guess I would be interested in what the plan is, given the earlier plan has hit a barrier. What is the plan to address that barrier?

The Housing First really is a philosophical approach at providing housing with some obvious approaches that need to be considered and so on under an operational plan. I am wondering if there are any infrastructure considerations or aspects to the Housing First approach.

In terms of solar, I am also very happy to see the solar installations. I just had an assessment done on my house. I have fairly good solar, but not great. Twelve-year simple payback, internal rate of return over 25 years is 7.5 percent per year. When you consider that that’s before taxes, I am getting a $500 benefit per year. I’m not paying tax on that, so it is really more like a $700 benefit, not to mention some of the jobs that go along with that and the environmental gains and so on.

I am looking forward to some of the evaluation, but I just wanted to mention on the Hay River side of things, was that a Housing Corporation installation of 60 kilowatts and was there a miscommunication there? I think it’s clear that with the Net Metering Policy there is a five kilowatt limit, but with our Solar Strategy that ENR has, I believe there is an interest in having commercial providers with larger solar installations, and I see no reason why the Housing Corp couldn’t negotiate with the power provider to provide power there. I would expect that something like that might be worth considering in order to get full benefits from that installation and enable additional work.

I have to also stress the need for seniors housing and particularly, as a Yellowknife MLA, for the Aven’s stuff. I know the department has played a role in that and I know that the corporation is aware that there is an aging in place problem with infrastructure and that there is a potential role again for the corporation to play there. I have heard the Minister say he is very open on that before and confirmed today, so I don’t need to hear all of those remarks repeated, but I wanted to raise that with the urgency that Ms. Bisaro and others underscored earlier. I will leave it at that. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Minister McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the Member’s comments about the work that the NWT Housing Corporation is doing and some of the direction that we are learning. The Member is correct; I have replied to a number of these issues, but there is a couple that I won’t touch on again.

CMHC funding does decline to zero in 2038. I think this year alone our net loss on that was $1.2 million, I believe, or $768,000. It is one of the two numbers. I think all of the deputies in the country have a meeting with the new president of the CMHC in early November. We are co-chairing the meeting. We are actually still co-chairs of the FPT and we have not been able to get everybody into the same room, partly because we want our federal representatives there and the federal Minister and we want to have a discussion with them. Across the country in some of the larger jurisdictions, they are starting to feel the effects of the loss of money from CMHC. We felt it right away because we are such a small jurisdiction. We recognized that it was going to be a challenge for us. I think they are starting to feel the effects now, and we are hoping to get together, to get all in the same room with the political leaders across the country.

The Member is talking about the demolition. We have demolished 75, I think 20 this year, so we would like to be able to expedite that. One of the challenges that we face in some of the smaller communities is that they see a house that is standing that to them is a perfectly good house, and then we say we are going to come in an demolish it, and they say you can’t demolish it, it is a good house. We say, well, there might be some liability there, and if we are going to turn it over to anybody, we are going to put them up for sale, we will do our assessment and make sure we are not turning over a liability. That is one of the challenges that we face. Your colleagues talked about one of the units that he represents with the number of vacant units in there, and we just had a situation in another one of the Sahtu communities where we had 10 vacant units. We made sure that they were all assessed and they were okay, and we made a deal with the community and I think they have ownership of those units now.

That is one of the challenges that we face, but we do need to start dealing with a lot of vacant older units in the communities, a lot of boarded up ones. We need to deal with those, because if you start getting young people, children, getting into there with some of the potential liability in there, then I think it’s on all of us. So we will deal with that and hopefully get a lot of those issues cleared up

I think I have touched on the new stuff that the Member raised. Again, Housing First, I will let Mr. Stewart touch on the Housing First because I know that we are part of a working group, and there was another one that you were going to…

---Interjection

Oh, right. The situation in Hay River with the panels. So, Mr. Chair, I will turn it over to Mr. Stewart.

Thank you, Minister. Mr. Stewart.

Thank you, Mr. Stewart. Continuing on with general comments, I have Mr. Bouchard.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I do have a couple of quick comments. I do appreciate the work that is being done on the solar panels at Whispering Willows.

I guess senior housing has been a big issue recently, and I know it’s going to continue to be a bigger problem with the aging population. Some of the problems that we are seeing are basically the quantity, I guess, the seniors in their own homes in places. I guess we’re having some difficulty in the placement side of it. There’s a gap, it seems to me,

between seniors that have houses that are dilapidated or need major retrofits. Housing has indicated that they’re probably too extreme to be taken on by a seniors program or whatever, so then a senior sells their home and then just basically has to be put on a list to go into social housing, so there’s a gap there between when you sell your personal home and get on to social housing. There’s that gap, that period of time where you’re in limbo. I guess that is a concern and I’m not sure how the department can look at doing that and looking to see if we could do a transition period of six months to a year to allow that gap between when people need to sell their home for whatever reason, whether it’s the need of the house or whether it’s the need of the senior, and when you get on the list. Right now, you can’t apply and get on the list until you sell your house, so you’re basically throwing yourself out to the wolves before you get on the list.

The other thing that we’re seeing with seniors is a lot of them are couples and the fact that there’s a big discrepancy between income requirements for a single and the income requirements for a couple. You would think it would be almost double, but it doesn’t really work out that way. The numbers are probably slanted to the single quite a bit, 75 percent and you only get an additional 25 percent for that second person, so if you have two professionals that are seniors that have a good income, sometimes that’s more difficult to get into that type of stuff.

Other areas that we’re seeing, and it may be just based on demand… Like I said, we have some couples that are seniors that definitely don’t want to be in a… They may not be in a housing requirement but they may be requiring. We need that, kind of, that gap, and some of it may have to do with the public sector. We may need some private investment. I think we need NWT Housing to look at that gap between private sector and public housing, and somewhere in the middle there should be a mixture unit that we can mix the two, and similar to what some of the Yellowknife MLAs have indicated, some of those will require different needs. If we had a unit that would have different types of seniors as well as some of their needs, so then you could also put a nurse or something like that into that facility and that would allow some of those seniors that are aging and require a little bit of assistance to fulfill that kind of need that’s being left in the lurch right now.

That being seniors, I think there are a couple other issues in Hay River that I’ve seen. Obviously, that Disneyland area that we have in the community, I think we have just about eliminated all of the units that are there. There may be one or two that are still operational, but going forward, what is the plan for that area, for adding units into there, maybe multi-family, or are we looking at just leaving that

piece of land vacant for now? If I could get direction on what the department is looking for going forward with that.

One other area that I’m seeing difficulty in is the rating. This is for more single individuals, but you go on a wait-list to get into social housing. I had a fine example of an individual that was working poor and wanted to be in social housing but kept being bumped down the list because he actually had an income and was able to couch surf for a year or two years with family and friends, but had that little bit of support and a little bit of an income, and he actually was being bumped down from people that were coming into the community, didn’t have a job, didn’t, I would say, even try, but they would get a higher rating because they were that much more needed. They needed more stuff from the social housing. I mean, I think some of these are operational, but they are all based on the demand of infrastructure in housing. Those are my opening comments.

Thank you, Mr. Bouchard. I’ll allow the Minister to reply. Minister McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We believe that the private sector can play a role in the supply of housing in the Northwest Territories. Through some of our third-party programs, I think we do work with private developers. In some of the communities we offer incentives for private developers to provide housing for professionals in their community.

The Disneyland, our plan is to have it vacant for now and then we’ll look at what different options we might have for that particular piece of property.

On the seniors that are selling their own homes, the Member makes a fair comment that there’s a gap between the time they sell their homes and they’re able to access public housing if that’s what they’re trying to get into, and it’s something that they may plan for before they sell their house, but it’s a fair comment, and I suppose it’s something that we’d need to have a look at to see where we can play a role there.

The point rating system, I think we designed the point rating system so they would be rated based on their need. We heard the concern so many times in a lot of the small communities that there was favouritism that was going on and we thought the point system would alleviate some of that. For the most part, I think it has. It’s unfortunate that the person that you speak of keeps getting bumped down the list again. I suppose we’d have to evaluate how things are done and how they’re rated. The fact that he had some income, as you mentioned, Mr. Bouchard, is probably one of the reasons that he kept getting bumped down the list, because his need didn’t seem to be as high as someone else’s. Again, we’ll look at that.

I think I touched on most of the Member’s concerns.

Thank you, Minister McLeod. Committee, are we okay to go to detail?

Thank you, committee. If I can turn committee’s attention to page 57 of the expenditure capital items expense under Housing Corporation. We’re going to actually defer page 57. I’d like to go to page 58, finance and infrastructure services, information item. Any questions? Mr. Bromley.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I’m just wondering, I see for Detah/Ndilo some major retrofits, but I’m wondering: is there a schedule for providing new public housing in Detah/Ndilo other than this fiscal year? I was disappointed not to see any there, and for Yellowknife, as per our earlier discussion.

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Minister McLeod.

We have no new public housing or no public housing replacement units for Detah/Ndilo in this fiscal year. As far as the long-term plan, I would have to see what our long-term plan is.

Again, we have the major retrofits that we’re planning on doing there. As far as the long-term plan, again, we’re using the recently completed Community Needs Survey to help us to determine our next allocation of capital projects, and as soon as we have that, then we will share that with committee, obviously, and we’ll have an opportunity to have a discussion on the Community Needs Survey in our briefing with committee next week.

Thanks to the Minister for that. Yes, that, I think, will be a key document and I’ll be very curious on what that shows for the communities I represent.

My last question here is how many homeownership units, I believe I heard the Minister say some of them were being converted to public housing recognizing that people don’t have the capacity to take advantage of those homeownership units. That’s certainly been the case in Detah and Ndilo. In Detah and Ndilo, how many public housing homeownership units have been converted to public housing over the last couple of years? Thank you.