Thank you very much, Madam Chair. And I appreciate the comments on both Friday and today from my colleague from Frame Lake in regards to funding for the Northwest Territories Housing Corporation. And one of the things that was said on Friday struck me. It was in regards to the process for requesting funding from the Financial Management Board Secretariat and the process of budgeting for the government, which is where the Housing Corp sticks to the standard of budgeting that is expected of them for the main estimates process and that they're essentially playing by the rules for the government. But the problem that I see with that is that if we look at the increases to funding over the last ten years for the GNWT, the increases to funding for the GNWT main estimates have gone up by 51 percent over the last decade whereas the increases to the Housing Corporation have gone up on average of 31 percent for the last decade. So already the GNWT has far exceeded the increases to their main estimate budgets than the NWT Housing Corporation has.

If we think about what's happened in housing for the same amount of time over the course of the last decade, the state of housing in the Northwest Territories has also declined. And so while the funding is not keeping up, the state of housing in the Northwest Territories is going down, and I kind of wanted to speak about that a little bit. And I know that this is about the budget as a whole for the NWT Housing Corporation but I think that this is a really important conversation to have in this section given that it is executive, and so I appreciate the indulgence of committee, if I may.

When I was sitting and doing some research on the weekend in regards to Housing Corporation and our assets, we have 2500 public housing units, and if we take a round number of about $600,000 per public housing unit in the Northwest Territories, that would mean that the NWT Housing Corporation has an asset -- or has about $1.5 billion of assets in housing, which is pretty remarkable and pretty impressive. But the problem we get to is that industry standard says that the annual payout for O and M that public housing should see is about 2 percent annually, and so that brings us to $30 million for O and M for those 2500 public housing units. And then industry standard also says that to replace units, it's also a standard of about 2 percent a year. That's also $30 million. So that means that we need $60 million just to maintain the housing stock that we currently have.

So if we look at the $11 million that we're putting into housing from the GNWT main estimates that we're looking at right now, that puts at a $49 million deficit annually. And if we forecast that forward to when our CMHC funding declines, that puts us at a deficit of approximately two-thirds of a billion dollars. And I know I'm using up a lot of my time but I want to make a point here.

We're not giving housing the money that they need to actually maintain their stock that they have today. And that doesn't even include the infrastructure deficit that we're looking at already. So if we don't start putting more money into housing today, we're going to have a much bigger problem on our hands down the road. And so the 19th Assembly won't be the only Assembly talking about housing; they'll be screaming about housing years down the road. And so if we don't start putting money into it today, we're going to have a much bigger problem on our hands.

So I'd like to know, again, how come NWT Housing Corporation is not asking for more money in this budget? Thank you.