Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chair, as you may recall, Members on this side of the House proposed a motion in June of last year where we asked the government to make a commitment to reduce the level of core need in NWT housing at the rate of 2 per cent per year for four years.
It is my understanding that this hasn't happened. In fact, the same number of units are available in social housing today as there have been for many, many years. Without adding new units to our stock, we are never going to get on top of the waiting lists which are common to all social housing LHOs. That hasn't changed, to the best of my knowledge, and nor has level of core need. I am not aware of an investment in the three areas of core need, which are overcrowding, affordability, and suitability, meaning the condition of the house, that there has been an investment that would reduce the level of core need by 2 per cent.
We are well aware that CMHC's support for the Housing Corporation O and M has been declining for about 25 years at this point, and it will continue to decline for another 20. The Housing Corporation has not been able to come up with a plan to offset that decline in revenue. I know there are some new initiatives, for example, the RCMP housing and having tenants pay a greater proportion of their utilities, but at the end of the day it does not offset the amount of money that is being taken out of the Housing Corporation by declining CMHC support.
Mr. Chair, we are at a moment when we need transformative change in the Housing Corporation. We need to rethink the way that we provide social housing in the Northwest Territories. I appreciate the Minister's commitment to her housing survey, and I am looking forward to seeing the results, but at the end of the day I don't think that crowd-sourcing housing policy is going to give us the transformative change that this agency needs in order to meet our current needs, let alone our future needs, in terms of social housing.
I recognize this is an expensive area to make investments in, both for the construction costs and the operations and maintenance cost, but, at the same time the needs keep getting greater. I don't know to what extent we can keep asking people to defer their need for a house to the need to build a road to one place or another. It does not seem to me that housing benefits from these roads or from economic development generally. There has been no evidence that that has been the case in the last 20 years, where our economic fortunes have gone up and down according to the resource economy that sustains us.
All of that to say that the Minister has a very difficult portfolio. She has a portfolio where the budget is not meeting the needs of the people who are depending on it, and there is no prospect of it doing so anytime in the future, short of this transformative change that I have just spoken about. Having said that, those are my opening comments, and I look forward to asking my questions. Thank you.