Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Fundamental to any community's success is local ownership of land and buildings. Local landlords reinvest their rents into the community. They take more risk on local businesses, and they are key to a community's identity. However, Mr. Speaker, our capital city has a serious problem with local ownership. Thousands of our housing units and millions of dollars' worth of commercial office space are owned by southern REITs or various southern multi-billion-dollar investment funds. These landlords have long treated real estate as an investment as opposed to the offices and homes that we all live and work in.

Put more bluntly, Mr. Speaker, I want the GNWT to stop leasing from Northview high yield investment trust. I want us to stop being the anchor tenant in all of their buildings when they have repeatedly shown little interest in our community. The GNWT has funded this monopoly for years at a cost to Northerners. Furthermore, Mr. Speaker, when many of these long-term leases were signed, Northview was Northern Properties and actually was locally owned. They were signed, and we justified negotiating many of those leasers at a higher lease rate as opposed to ownership to build up a northern business. This, in fact, is allowed in the GNWT Leasing of Improved Property Policy. However, we are not allowed to pay a premium to southern landlords, Mr. Speaker. Over the years, these properties have been sold and resold, and we have renewed the leases without any consideration of our own policy.

Our current policy requires that the GNWT only lease at a rate no greater than the cost of ownership. If we are going to sign a lease at a cost greater than owning a building, it must be to a northern business. A lease-versus-ownership analysis is required for every building in every GNWT lease signed over five years. Those premiums can only be paid to northern companies, Mr. Speaker. The Department of Infrastructure manages a $28-million lease portfolio. That is 109 leases for a total of 626,000 square feet of office space, many of them in downtown Yellowknife. That is millions of dollars that should be going to local landlords, to Indigenous development corporations, and to anyone willing to make sure that our government's rent money stays in this territory. I will have questions for the Minister of Infrastructure about: despite all the talk of supporting northern businesses, we are not paying our rent to northern businesses. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.