Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. I have to confess that before I was elected I really didn't pay a lot of attention to the housing situation here in the Northwest Territories, but I was certainly shocked when I did look into the 2014 housing needs survey. You know, the sort of statistics in here, non-market communities, 44.3 per cent of our housing has problems. Thirty-two point three per cent of non-market communities have housing in core need. That's a third of the housing in non-market communities. People should let that sink in for a minute. Now, when we talk about housing, people need to understand, I think, as that the mover says -- and I want to thank the mover for her efforts on this -- that it does actually create jobs. Construction creates seven times the number of jobs compared to oil and gas extraction, three times the number of jobs compared to diamond mining. Repair and maintenance creates 25 times the number of jobs compared to oil and gas and 12 times the number of jobs compared to diamond mining.

These aren't socialist statistics or come from some crazy source, these are actually from the Northwest Territories Bureau of Statistics and 2012 NWT Economic Multipliers Report. I'm not making this up. If we want to put our people to work in the Northwest Territories, put them to work building homes and maintaining them. That's what's going to turn our economy around, not big mega projects. We need to invest in housing. I don’t have to make the case for this. The mover and the seconder already did that. When we reviewed the business plans, I was certainly surprised that we don’t actually have a plan to bring our housing stock into better shape.

I asked directly the president of the Housing Corporation, "do we actually have a plan to bring our housing out of core need?” No, we don’t have such a plan. I was just astounded. In the federal budget, the federal government is actually looking at doubling its investment in affordable housing. They've indicated that they have $732 million for Aboriginal and Northern Housing in the last federal budget. We don’t have a plan to access that funding. We don’t have a proposal. Sure, there's guidelines that may still have to be developed, but we don’t have a submission ready to give to the federal government to bring our housing out of core needs. That's a failure of our system. We've got to develop that plan. That's what this motion calls for and I implore our Members of this House to support it unanimously. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.