Thank you, Mr. Chair. We appreciate the comment’s that the Member made and it’s correct, it is a team effort, not only with the folks delivering the program but I think it’s also the Members of the Legislative Assembly because, as I said before, without a lot of the support that they give us, it makes it harder for us to move some of our initiatives forward. So I think we can all take credit for that.
The decline in CMHC funding, I mean, that’s an issue that we’re going to have to deal with and we’ll have to continue to bring that forward.
The aging stock, again, that’s another one we have to deal with. We do have a mid-life retrofit that goes into a lot of these units. We expect, I think, about 50 years out of them. So we do a mid-life retrofit and we’ve done a lot of those. Our plan is to replace 40 of these units a year with newer stock, and again, that will have a trickle-down effect because they’ll be a lot more energy efficient and everything else will go down.
Dealing with the arrears, and one of the things we’ve done, I think, which alleviates a lot of the pressure on the local housing authorities is we’ve taken a lot of those arrears to headquarters in Yellowknife and we have started to deal with and hear. One of the problems we’ve faced in a lot of the smaller communities especially, not so much the bigger communities, but the smaller communities, is the people that work in the LHO know pretty much everybody in town and it was difficult for them, I think, in many cases, to try and do evictions or do some collection off those. So we thought by bringing it here to the capital, and I think we’ve seen a good indicator of that improvement because we do the garnishees, we do the evictions out of headquarters and I think that’s going a long way to having people step up and start dealing with many of the issues, and we’ve taken a lot of pressure off of the LHOs. At the end of the day I think that’s a good thing.
Mr. Bouchard’s comments, we’re doing five seniors’ units right now. I’m not sure what the long-term plan is. I would have to find that, but we’re hoping that’s a start in dealing with much of the aging population as we know is coming. So we’ll continue to work on that. We do offer, I just announced, I think, in my comments about the care mobility where we will work with a lot of the seniors or people that have mobility issues in taking care of that so they can actually stay in their houses or stay in their units much longer. Like through the Preventative Maintenance Program, and I think there’s a number of other programs that are offered through the Government of the Northwest Territories to assist seniors in staying in their own homes. I can think of the fuel subsidy and there are a few others, but we try to do what we can to have them stay in their own units for as long as possible. That will take some of the pressure off them moving into public housing or into a seniors’ facility. We do recognize that it is an issue that’s forthcoming so, doing the five seniors unit is a start, and we’ll continue to… I’m going to have Mr. Stewart a little later touch on the centralizing, leasing and purchasing and that. I’ll have Mr. Stewart touch on that a bit.
Mr. Bromley’s comments, I’ll take the suite. I won’t respond to this, however. No. Member Bromley is correct. The survey tool is an important instrument in how we determine some of our allocations. I think I said that on a number of occasions. You see there is an improvement in numbers. We spent a lot of money in the last eight years in trying to improve our housing stock; $182 million was spent in a lot of the smaller communities; $72 million was spent in some of the regional centres and I think about $29 million was spent in capital. There has been a major increase in the money that we spent. We try to distribute it around in the smaller communities when you have 65 percent of the homes in the community are housing stock and that’s what you see. If you look in some of the market communities, Yellowknife for example, that number is not as high. I’m not sure what the exact percentage is. So, some of the options that they have are options that they don’t have in the smaller communities. The Territorial Rent Supplement Program is one way we try to deal with that. It was designed more for the market communities so we can get more people into units.
Our numbers for that are down. We think a lot of people actually have used it for the two years and it’s allowed them to get a foot up. They were able to save some money and move into homeownership. We find that those numbers are down, but we will continue to take applications for that.
This is where we talk about partnering. That’s one of the advantages that I think we have here in the capital is that we are able to partner with a number of organizations. We’ll make contributions to them so that the ability to partner with community groups, I think, is more evident here in the capital than it is in a lot of the smaller communities where the housing LHOs are about the only partner we have there. I said it before. I think we see that in the Northern Pathways to Housing Program, where we are trying to deliver, where we have four pilots that we’re hoping to do this here.
I mentioned the figures that we have $100,000 that we would use to renovate an existing unit in the community, $70,000 a year over five years to partner with an organization in the community to watch over this unit for us, provide services or just be there. We have two communities that have proposals in. We are still waiting to engage with a couple more. We think that might deal with some of the issues in some of the smaller communities. Unfortunately they still will gravitate towards the larger communities because there just is a lot more there for them. If we can keep them in communities… these are designed for people who don’t have homes that need maybe a place to sleep for the night and just to have a roof over their head instead of just wandering around. We’re hoping that will alleviate some of the pressure. As I said before, it’s a pilot project. If we find that it’s working, then we’ll do the evaluation. If we find it’s working well, then we’ll expand the program. Hopefully that’ll take some of the pressure off a lot of people coming to the larger… It is one that is definitely on the radar. It’s one that we feel that we have to deal with. We are trying for utilities. Again, Mr. Stewart is going to touch on utilities. Very briefly I can say it is something that these numbers that we have I think are from the spring. These numbers are from the spring, so we haven’t been able to do the calculations with all of the drop in prices. With the new system, we are monitoring all of the utilities for the communities now. I think that came into effect April 1st of last year. We are able to gather some baseline data now.
We’ll be able to share that with the Members.
A lot of the improvements that we’ve made over the years I believe are geared more towards energy efficiency because obviously if your house is energy efficient or the unit is energy efficient, and then there will be some savings in the long run. I think in a couple of communities, we’ve gone to a central biomass heating operation. We’re looking to realize some of the savings in that. It was just on the news last year. We were doing the panels and the home in Hay River. Again, we’re looking to see some of the savings out of that. We’ve been monitoring the unit up in Inuvik for the last couple of years. It is online. We’re looking to see with all… it was a bit of a research project, so we want to see what the outcome is of that. I know it was very expensive to build. I think we put in $500,000 into that unit and I believe CMHC gave us $500,000. It was very expensive, but we want to see if there is some… it was a research project so you pay for those to help you develop some options going forward.
Seniors in assisted living, we do contribute again to some of the organizations here in town that maintain some... I don’t have the exact numbers. Mr. Stewart may have those. He may want to touch on that, or we can get into it as we get into detail. I think I’ve touched on the issues that the last few Members have raised. If I missed any, my apologies. Mr. Bromley’s comment about the income assistance, we can have that conversation outside of here and we’ll be able to fill you in on some of the work that we’re doing going forward. We’ll have that conversation. I’m going to ask Mr. Stewart if he can touch on Mr. Bouchard’s comments on the centralization or the purchasing and the other contributions. Thank you, Mr. Chair.