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.