Marci cho, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I rise also in support of this motion. I think that the housing situation in the NWT is bad. We have situations in our small communities where we have a lot of home ownership units. The survey from the Housing Corporation itself indicates that over 38 per cent of those units are in core need, and the majority of that core need is made up of suitability and adequacy issues. I questioned the way they determine core need with the idea that NWT Housing Corporation has a strong belief and apparently so do the federal government that a person that has a perfectly good home that's suitable that cannot afford it is actually in core need. I just don’t understand that logic, but that as it may be makes this motion important that when the government responds to it and we're asking for a plan, we need to look at that because in reality if you said you wanted to reduce a core need by two per cent per year or eight per cent over the next four years, you can just provide cash subsidies to the 1,800 people on the list that we’re considering to have an affordability issue only and we're counting them as core need, and we would just eliminate core need or reduce core need much below the national averages by addressing core need by addressing affordability which the Government calls core need.

So I want to make sure that when the government responds to this, that they're responding to it in a constructive way where we can see housing projects, where we can see jobs in small communities and some of the people in these communities that are counted to have core need issue because they have an affordability issue can actually take themselves out of core need just by working. I think then it's really important that the government when they put this plan together, if they put this plan together, it's going to be a recommendation from this side, I'm sure, that it includes good projects in the communities, projects where something physical happens so that we have people working on these houses in the communities addressing the core need issues for those specific homes, hopefully addressing some aging in place issues at the same time. It's got a lot of good facets to trying to do some work in housing. I considered to go very well for the employment and especially for the individuals in housing.

You know, public housing people often come to me and say, "my house is in very poor shape." Often my response is, "well, it shouldn’t be." "My house is too small." "well, it shouldn't be." Because public housing is designed to eliminate core need. We have people in public housing and the Government themselves, the Housing Corporation themselves, indicate that there's a huge issue with suitability in public housing, a huge issue with adequacy in public housing. These public housing units have maintenance budgets, they have extraordinary maintenance, they have retrofit budgets, all of these things that are actually supposed to address the housing problem and apparently it doesn't. So when I looked at core need, I'm looking at home ownership and I'm concentrating on home ownership, and that's the majority of my work as a Regular Member in this Assembly, as a Member on Cabinet, as a Regular Member previously, the majority of my work has been to address housing needs.

I got into a community and I visit 30 households, 15 of them, 20 of them, are talking about housing, even if it's a separate issue. It always comes back to housing. Everyone has a housing issue. There's no jobs out there for them to be able to take themselves out of core need. It's an opportunity here for the Housing Corporation to use the money that they get from the Government, from us, and from the Federal Government, and from the GNWT every year to be able to effectively and strategically spend that money on housing where we have benefits, benefits of employment that'll have -- and I've been talking about this forever -- that has a rippling effect, a positive rippling effect, across the communities. If we're able to put people to work, they're able to address these core need issues.

So I think this is so important. I think this is a start. It would be a good start for this Assembly. If we're looking at moving to trying to seriously and strategically spend money and seriously and strategically try to lower the core needs across the NWT, I think we'll have made a big achievement. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.