Marsi cho, Mr. Speaker. Today, I am going to talk about the need for more assistance regarding home-ownership opportunities for residents of the NWT. Mr. Speaker, in the coming days, many of our residents are going to see an influx of money from class action law suits. The Indian Day School and Sixties Scoop survivors in our communities will see a one-time payment to them. I won't tell our residents how all they should spend their money, but they have told me they will look at home ownership. I would like to explore ways to assist them.
Mr. Speaker, there are some barriers I have seen when it comes to home ownership in the North. I believe we must expand on these services offered to our residents. One barrier is the massive amount of arrears that we are seeing at the local housing authority level. We often see assessing of people's incomes to pay for rent arrears. The GNWT needs to address the way assessments are done to account for fluctuations of income. Many of my constituents have different levels of income on any given day, depending on seasonal work and short-term contracts.
Other barriers, Mr. Speaker, include the inability to buy land or homes on certain lands, an inability to get home insurance, and government programs which require land tenure before any work gets completed. This is a huge problem in my riding in particular where a program such as the CARE program is inaccessible to people who are unable to buy the land on which the home sits. At the end of the day, Mr. Speaker, I think we all want to see our residents invest in themselves to get away from this, being perpetually dependent on public housing rent, and move towards being home owners wherever they can. Marsi cho, Mr. Speaker.