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.