We have offered up a meeting to the leadership of the Hay River Reserve. That has been a challenge. Almost from the time of the Minister previous to me, that has been a bit of a challenge. Part of it is because of the fact that it’s on reserve land. If there were eligible clients there and they were able to get I think it’s a band council resolution, a BCR, to have tenure to the land, then they would be able to have access to those units.

We’ve tried everything, we’ve tried selling it to the band. We’ve had many discussions on this particular file and we’d really like to see it come to a conclusion because those units have been empty for a while and, ideally, we’d like to see six clients in there. If we can get six clients that are eligible, six clients that have land tenure because land tenure is one of the conditions of accessing our program.

We’ve worked with the band. I know they’ve written a letter to AANDC, if I’m not mistaken. So it’s something that we need to get resolved fairly quickly because these houses have been empty. I’ve been Minister now of the NWT Housing Corporation since 2009 and those units have been empty since then, and even before then I think they were still just being completed. Part of the problem was getting them completed in a timely manner. I think that’s what kind of held everything up and then getting suitable or eligible clients to get in there and, as well, getting the land tenure.

So, I believe I’ve written a letter, or the president has written a letter to the leadership there and we’ve offered up another meeting because this is a situation that we would like to get resolved. We’ve been working with the Hay River Reserve to try to make that happen. Thank you.

My final point is just trying to understand the scope of April 1, 2014, when there is the transfer of responsibility, more authority, and in respect of land tenure and whether that holds any implications for the Housing Corporation. Right now, currently in communities you have Commissioner’s and then you have Crown land or IAB lands, and whether that’s going to change, because I think in people’s aspirations to build their own home there has to be, of course, a level of equity plus financing, and banks want a level of certainty, and whether that’s going to change or not.

The Crown land will convert to Commissioner’s land. The IAB lands will pretty well remain the same because I think that is an agreement with the Government of Canada to reserve land, so I don’t think those are going to change. I’ll confirm that and I’ll communicate that to the Member, but as far as I understand, that’s the only one that won’t change.

Thank you, Minister McLeod. Next on my list I have Ms. Bisaro.

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.

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. We’ll go to Minister McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I thank the Member for the concerns that she’s raised. When she talks about the capacity, I believe the Housing Corporation has demonstrated that they do have the capacity, and I use the example of all the money we got for the Affordable Housing Initiative a few years ago, and we had to get all those projects on the ground. I think it was quite a task for a couple years and we managed to get all the units on the ground. I think we’re one of the only jurisdictions in the country that was able to use all the money and match all the money. We had to deal with the problem of vacant units afterwards, but we wanted to make sure that we got the product on the ground to access the money that was made by the federal government. I believe we do have the capacity.

In ’13-14, I think we’re on track to have 90 percent of our capital projects completed. Our carry-overs, I think, are getting smaller and smaller every year, so we’ve been fortunate that we’ve been able to get most of our capital on the ground, and it’s our goal to make sure that we get our capital on the ground, because the longer we delay then the longer people have to wait for these particular units.

The Homelessness Fund, the hard to house, I believe we had $280,000 that was earmarked for that. The Shelter Capital Fund, we have earmarked $100,000 for that. Now, that’s to go to help the NGOs with some repairs that might be needed. It’s application based, so again, it’s a new one and we’ll see how that rolls out.

As far as evaluating our programs, I believe we have an ongoing evaluation of our programs. I think Members are well aware in the last few years we’ve

made a lot of changes, and a lot of changes we made on the fly when we realized that maybe this can work better or we can improve in this area, so rather than wait three years to say we need to improve this, we tried to initiate those improvements right away. We’ve had a number of changes to our programs over the last number of years.

The transitional rent supplement, the Member spoke to one area in particular which is basically getting a building that is free, on top of getting some money from the Housing Corporation to assist with the O and M. This was specifically earmarked for those that are going into market housing and had to pay the market rate and it was a struggle for a lot of them. This program was mostly designed for them. I think it’s working quite well. I’ve had some comments come back.

I will have Mr. Stewart touch on the standards if you don’t mind, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Mr. Stewart.

Thank you, Mr. Stewart. I will allow Ms. Bisaro just to have one quick follow-up question. Ms. Bisaro.

Mr. Chair, it’s not really a question, but thanks to Mr. Stewart for I think hopefully indicating that this issue is going to be addressed. I can appreciate that maybe standards aren’t the only way to go, but there is a concern for the safety of the people that are working in some of the homeless shelters.

I did forget to mention that I’ve noticed in the mission, as I looked at the mission for the Housing Corp, there’s no mention of homelessness. Now that we have a homelessness coordinator housed within the Housing department, I wonder if the Housing Corporation would consider changing their

mission slightly to address the issue of homelessness since you are now responsible for that. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Bisaro. Minister McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We would be willing to do that. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Moving on with general questions, I have Mr. Moses.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to thank the Minister and his staff for exchanging some information with us today. It’s been over two years, I guess, since we’ve been working with the Housing Corporation. I just want to commend the Minister and his staff on the improvements and hard work that they’ve done. It’s been very noticeable. I know we get a lot of good feedback within committee after our exchanges or meetings that we do have, so that’s been great.

First off, I just want to talk about some of the investments into our public housing stock as well as the transitional housing and Shelter Capital Fund. We have a good program going on in Inuvik right now that just started up with very minimal dollars, so it’s nice to see some of these dollars that are put in here for the upcoming budget that Inuvik can be possibly one of the leading groups that are working with very little to provide shelter for those that need it. So, I am very happy to see that in the budget.

There is also mention of improved energy efficiencies, and speaking with a couple of constituents back home that are interested in this area, it’s nice to see that it’s still looked at and there is support out there to see what we can provide in communities where we can provide some of these energy efficiencies.

The Minister did mention earlier about giving Members an update or just a briefing note on the evictions of people in the communities, constituents. I for one deal with some of that on a regular basis, but just getting the whole briefing note and understanding how hard the LHOs and how hard the Housing Corp has worked to try to keep people in their homes in most cases and working out every last bit of possible avenue to help people get through it. I think there were 30 cases that he mentioned that are going to court in terms of the mortgage arrears. I know this government and this department is working hard to address those issues.

Members made comments of the Transitional Rental Supplement Program. I won’t get into that any further, but it’s nice to hear that it’s still being utilized and there are people that are getting into that.

I don’t have a whole lot to say about this Housing Corp. There’s been a lot of good work over the last two years and I know committee can also preach to that.

The Minister does know that I did have a constituency concern just recently, as of yesterday and today. It brought attention to this new act that Alberta has just passed. It’s the new Home Buyer Protection Act. That just deals with mandatory warranty programming and it will actually hold the builders more accountable when they are building some of these houses in Alberta. I want to ask the Minister if we have anything similar here in the Northwest Territories that would hold people that are building our dwellings and housing in the communities more accountable, especially with the plan to build 100 units over the next three years. It might be something to look into and see if there is any way that, as a government, we can legislate some type of act that would hold people building these units more accountable. Obviously, we want to make sure that we have proper housing units that will house people in the communities, but as we look to bring more people in from down south, that they have proper housing.

One other question that was brought up that is just how does the department write off and certify a housing unit when it’s built and ready for move-in. Do we have a proper inspector with proper regulations to sign off on those units? Obviously, we are going to have 100 units built over the next three years, so we want to make sure that we have all these things in place.

I just want to make a comment, and I think Mr. Menicoche made comments about the shelter and some of the vacant units in our small communities. Committee did hear from some Members that some of our residents going through some kind of treatment program outside of the Northwest Territories not having the proper support or having some kind of halfway house when they come back to the community for support, and whether or not an NGO can take over one of these vacant units to have some kind of transitional program in a small community, or regional community, for that matter, where they continue to get the support that they need. I know Yellowknife has quite a bit of opportunities or resources in that aspect, but even visiting those facilities here in Yellowknife there is also a definite need for more operations and more workers, as Ms. Bisaro said, and the safety as well.

Just some general comments. A couple of big issues there towards the end, but all in all the Housing Corporation has done a great job, and working with them since the beginning of the 17th Assembly there have been a lot of good improvements and the communication has been one of the better ones with departments. Just general comments. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Moses. We will go to Minister McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the Member’s comments on the work that the Housing Corporation has done. As I said on a number of cases, we have come up with a lot of initiatives and then we task our officials with doing all the work and they do a very good job.

The public housing stock, we are placing I think 39. You notice, when we do talk about our public housing stock, we always talk about replacement. We are not adding any new public housing on. If we put 39 in, we will more than likely be taking 39 out, some of our older units because we do have a lot of old units out there. Part of that is as a result of the declining CMHC funding.

We still are hoping to meet with the new federal Minister of Housing with my colleagues across the country. We are co-chairs of the Federal/Provincial/Territorial Ministers of Housing, so we need to get some face time with the new Minister. I think he had committed to Premiers, when they were at Niagara-on-the-Lake, that he was going to try to get together with the Housing Ministers. That’s something we’re working on right now.

The application-based program through the homelessness, I believe the particular one that the Member was raising, I believe they have an application in and it’s just in the process right now. I think we do support two or three initiatives in the community of Inuvik, accessing some of this money, but I believe the new one has… I see your colleague is giving you a hard time about that. Actually, I think there are none in Inuvik and 10 in Yellowknife.

---Laughter

We’re reviewing the application right now.

Again, I appreciate the Member’s comments. I think it’s something that the message is starting to get out there. I always say that Housing didn’t just wake up this morning and decide they were going to evict somebody today. In a lot of cases, it’s a year-long process. I’ve heard the saying that we don’t evict people, people evict themselves, and I believe that. It’s almost a year-long process and they’re given a number of chances to try and stay out of being evicted. Some of them will take us up on it and they will honour it. There are some that will use all those avenues at their disposal and then it comes to an actual eviction, and I think that’s when Members of the Assembly hear from them, is when the actual eviction is taking place, so we like to provide Members with a small briefing outlining the chronology of events that took place to lead up to the actual eviction.

With the home warranty, the units that we built, our technical people will inspect those homes and

ensure that they’re built according to the Building Code and according to our specifications. They will normally carry a one-year deficiency warranty. For people who purchase homes – and I think that was the case in this event, that home was built and this was the second owner, they weren’t buying it from the actual builder, they were buying it from someone else who had it built – part of the responsibility would fall on the homeowner that’s buying the unit to ensure that they have a proper inspection done. I think we’ve gone above and beyond in a lot of the cases, where some of the houses we’ve built and maybe two years later somebody says this isn’t working, our folks will go back in there to ensure that it’s working. Again, it’s something that we need to work on, but I know for the units that we’re having built – and the Member mentioned the 100 units that we’re doing over the next three years – of course we’ll ensure that they go through a rigorous inspection process to make sure that we’re getting a good quality product. In most cases it’s a one-year warranty afterwards. So, we will do what we can to ensure that the public dollars we spend on these units is well spent. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Moving on with general comments, I have Mr. Bromley.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I also have found some very good and positive changes in the Housing Corporation, which I appreciate. I know the Minister has excellent staff. I like to share the credit and think that committee has also contributed. In fact, he has staff who listen well and he himself listens well and reacts positively. I think working as a team, big stuff can happen.

I have a number of questions just on the energy front, and I know that’s always an ongoing challenge of putting in some better monitoring to see what the effectiveness of our actions are and stuff like that, which I appreciate.

Heat and power costs I see are up by another $1 million this year in this budget, so there’s obviously still room for improvement. We’d like to see those go down, moving to renewables and energy efficiency. Specifically, I know solar water heating is a demonstrated technology. I know our solar plan seems to emphasize, almost exclusively, electricity, but some of our biggest gains have been made through the water heating and, in fact, solar water heating. In fact, I know that the Minister has staff with expertise and enthusiasm on this I think in Hay River. I think that’s an untapped resource that the Housing Corporation could be thinking about there. Would the Minister look into that?

He mentioned, I think in response to my colleague Mr. Dolynny, the question on hot water heaters. We have about 90 electric hot water heaters right now and I think the key question is what did we have

last year at this time, so if the Minister has access to that information, that would be a clear indication of progress.

On the housing for devolution, it’s tough for our communities – the professionals, housing, teachers, health professionals and so on, and now with devolution and decentralization – so I recognize there’s an issue there. The government is putting substantial money into that. Can the Minister give me assurance that this is not detracting from providing housing to those members of the public that need housing in a more serious way? They don’t have a job that takes them into the community, for example. This is market housing. Obviously, there’s no such thing in small communities, so I’m wondering: does that mean they will actually be paying the costs of this and that we will be recovering the costs of this housing?

The next area I have questions are in my constituency work I found that there are often differences between support programs in Education, Culture and Employment versus the Housing Corporation. One example that I’d like to see is the Housing Corporation change their policy – and I’ll be raising a reverse situation with ECE later – is children as dependents. ECE is satisfied that children are dependents whether or not they’re adopted. If in fact, in reality, they are the people who are the guardians and caregivers for our children, they don’t have to be adopted. The best example is quite frequently in our Aboriginal cultures, of course, are grandparents. When they’re looking after children, the Housing Corp refuses to acknowledge the number of children unless they’re adopted, unlike ECE which does acknowledge them. This is problematic, so if I can ask the Minister to look into this and hopefully revise the policy so that they’re in line. These are the sorts of things we’re hoping to get through the Anti-Poverty Strategy and so on, but this cross-departmental stuff is just tough to do, so I’m trying to raise some very specific examples.

Another issue that I’ve come across is the way people are prioritized for public housing, specifically people in transitional housing versus the homeless. Right now people in transitional housing are put on some… They’re not even put on a list, as far as I know. They’re supposed to be put on the list for housing. Often the transitional housing is inappropriate. It’s sort of an emergency basis. Here’s something transitional. Meanwhile, they’ll sit there and sit there and sit there, but somebody homeless will say I need a house and they’ll get the house. What would you expect to happen? Well, in fact it does. These families are making themselves homeless so that they can get on the darn list for public housing, and putting their families at risk. I’ve had this happen repeatedly with my constituents, families that are split up and couch surfing, camping in less than secure situations and so on. If

we’re putting people in transitional housing, let’s make them a priority for getting them into housing and prevent them having to make themselves homeless because they can’t take it anymore, because they’re not in appropriate housing, in order to try to get on the list.

I think another opportunity, and I know this department does listen and does try and deal with these. I am hopeful on this stuff.

There are still a few remnant issues from the days of ECE looking after public housing subsidies and they are remnants. I think the department has done a good job in dealing with the bulk of things, but nevertheless, there are remnant issues out there where, for example, clients or previous clients were inappropriately assessed where they did not take the paperwork that was given them and deal with it appropriately, or where the family moved out of public housing and it wasn’t recorded so they continued to be assessed at full cost now because there wasn’t any communication. These are wearer issues and remnant and historical. Often the paperwork is not there.

Now, I have been successful at getting some adjustments where paperwork does exist, but there are cases now where the paperwork doesn’t exist, but there’s a record of not taking appropriate action and being accurate by the Housing Corporation. That’s admitted where their people delivered, not necessarily Housing Corporation staff but the LHO. So again, an issue that could use some resolution. We’ve been doing major things to resolve these things in a big way, a systemic way. So this is clean-up stuff.

The last thing I wanted to mention was the apprentices that the Housing Corporation has. It has been a program I’ve always supported, always expressed an interest in, always appreciated information on it. If, once again, we could get an annual sort of report on where we’re at with apprentices, how many we have in what trades and specifically what’s happened to the ones that have sort of graduated out of the system and become full-fledged journeyman or whatever. I also notice a specific budget now, I think $127,000, a one-off thing perhaps or the start of a new program. I wouldn’t mind hearing a little bit about that. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. We’ll go to Minister McLeod.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. First of all, the Member was talking about sharing the credit, and I think I’ve given credit to committee in committee and I’ll do it publicly. A lot of the initiatives that we’ve worked on I think would be very difficult to put through if we didn’t have the support of committee and this Legislative Assembly. So that support is much appreciated.

The housing for devolution, as the Member called it, we’re looking at it as housing for staff in the communities and it won’t be just specifically earmarked. It’s not taking away from the work that we’re trying to do. We have 100 units that are identified for housing for staff. We kind of have an initial allocation right now. It’s not finalized yet, we’re working with that. As well, we still have the incentive program that we’re trying to work with the communities so they can provide some housing as well. I mean, I can assure the Member and this Assembly that these aren’t just specifically earmarked for any devolution positions that might be going to the communities. We just wanted to ensure, and I think as a government wanted to ensure, that there was some options available to those that might be moving into the community where positions might be available and we didn’t want to see anybody not wanting to go there because of issues with housing. So we’re trying to address all the issues we’ve had with housing in trying to improve on the stock we have in the community. We’ve improved some of the incentives that we’ve offered to developers to try and get them to put some units in the communities. So there’s a lot of work that’s ongoing there.

The children as dependents, now I’m not sure how it would work today because children are dependents, and I don’t know if the Member is specially talking about public housing units, but that has no effect on their rent or anything like that unless they were over 18 and they were employed, then that would be part of their household income. Pardon me?

---Interjection

Size of unit, yes. They would know, yes, I suppose, if they’ve got four or five kids under their care, but I’ll look into that and see if the Member has any specific cases that he may want to share with me that brought this question about, then I’d be pleased to hear them. But as far as the actual assessment of rent itself, it has no bearing.

The transitional housing, we’ve had some success with this program and I think it’s helping people. The Member is talking about I think going from transitional housing. I’ll have Mr. Stewart add on to that in a minute.

The hot water tanks, I can’t remember the amount that we had last year, I don’t have that information in front of me, I will dig it up and share it with the Members of the Assembly and members of committee, but again, as I said before, with 216 major retrofits that are happening, I’m sure a good portion of those 90 will be hit by the 216. So we’ll have an updated list for the Members.

ECE, I believe we’ve hit pretty well every assessment that was done. I was sure we were at 100 percent of the ones that have provided the

paperwork. As far as not having the paperwork to validate their information, I mean, it would be awfully difficult for us to go back and make some adjustments, but the ones that have been able to provide the proper documentation, we have been able to make some adjustments and I believe in one case somebody that left, they’re going from $8,000 to zero. So a lot of it was on them providing the proper documentation. Again, I’ll follow up on that and if the Member has any specific cases that we can have a discussion about afterwards, I would be pleased to hear those.

So the apprentices, we’ll provide some information. I think we do have a one-pager that I would be more than happy to provide to committee. We’re quite proud of that program. We’ve had a lot of folks that have gone through that, we have a lot of them that are certified housing maintainers. We continue to support that and I think the Members of this Assembly continue to support that, so we look forward to that ongoing.

I will have Mr. Stewart, with the chair’s indulgence, touch on a couple of things. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. McLeod. Mr. Stewart.