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…
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