Thank you, Mr. Chair. First of all, the contract in McPherson has been awarded and my understanding is they are going to start the work this summer. The one in Aklavik, they are doing a great job on it. It should be opened in late spring. It should be completed in late spring. So we are looking forward to seeing how that rolls out.
Some of the Member’s comments, he was talking about the units in the communities. We recognize that we need places to stay in communities. It’s one of the reasons this government has committed $21 million over three years to put an additional 100 market rental units in the communities. I think that is going to go a long way to addressing some of our housing needs in the communities. We are doing replacement units right now and we keep saying we are challenged by the declining CMHC funding. We have been using that for a reason for a number of years, which is the truth. We are fortunate that our government has stepped up to the plate and I think they’ve contributed an additional $2.5 million to the NWT Housing Corporation to offset some of the declining CMHC funding. That’s a challenge that we face right now, but we feel with some of the programs that we have, with HELP and trying to transition more people out of public housing into homeownership, then that would free up more public housing units, because there’s always going to be a need for public housing units.
The elders, in many cases we have elders that will be in a particular public housing unit for 40, 45 years, pretty well since it was built. We’ve heard the concerns and we’ve actually kept many of these elders in their units because they just don’t want to move. There are some that do want to move to smaller units and we try and accommodate them. But for the most part, we try to keep the elders in a unit that they’ve pretty well had since the unit was built back in the ‘70s. We’re challenged on both sides, but we would like to get many of them into smaller units if that is their wish.
I think I’ve touched on all the Member’s points, and if I missed any, I’m sure the Member will remind me.