The motion is in order. To the motion. Member for Kam Lake.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, this is a very important one. We heard from multiple youth who were involved in or are involved in the child and family services system in care, or children who are not currently in care but that have been involved with the child and family services system and are choosing to use shelters to access safe housing. There is currently no available one-bedrooms or bachelor-type living -- or living options available in most of our communities in the Northwest Territories. And so when youth, or youth who age out of care, are looking for a place to live, a safe place to live, there aren't options out there. So youth often end up being in either visible or invisible homelessness situations.

We in Yellowknife here are privileged enough to have the North's only youth shelter. And this shelter cannot serve all of the youth in Yellowknife that currently need a housing solution. And so a lot of our youth end up putting themselves into unsafe living situations either -- well, I don't need to go into details here, Madam Chair. They end up putting themselves into unsafe situations. These unsafe situations often end up drastically reducing their quality of life, drastically having an impact on their hope, and also have an impact on their ability to access education, employment, and overall health. And so we need a housing strategy that specifically focuses on how we're going to support our youth so that we are not creating cycles of homelessness right off the bat. Thank you.

Thank you. To the motion. Member for Great Slave.

Thank you, Madam Chair. First, I want to thank the young man that I have had the pleasure to get to know over the last while who has really driven this situation and issue home for me. And honestly, I don't think I would have had the fortitude at the age of 16 to go out and advocate for myself the way that this young man has. And when I look at the absolute lack of response to his situation, again, I come back to the word shameful. You know, my response to the inquiries I got about him was that he could go to the youth shelter my colleague mentioned, or he could find himself a place to live.

So basically this 16-year-old, the impetus or the onus was on him to have to go and hit up all of his friends' parents to see if any one of them would take him in. And currently now he's in somewhat more of like a boarding home type situation renting a room. But that was all on himself to do that, and luckily for him there was a family that decided that they wanted to help advocate for him and then ended up finding him a place. But, again, very less than ideal. He still has to do all of his own planning and advocacy for himself. He has to daily liaise with his social worker to get things like internet so that he can, you know, do his schoolwork. He's an athlete. He has to do all of his own fundraising in trying to find his way to tournaments, you know, and he has a promising future there. And, really, it's been mind boggling to me the hurdles that, even myself as an adult trying to help him, I've been not able to really do anything. And it's very dismissive when the government comes back and washes their hands of things that are affecting our youth. Sometimes I can accept that when I'm coming to them and I'm saying I want to talk about this road, or I want to talk about this power plant. When we're talking about our youth and our children and that's the response that we get from this government, I have to say, Madam Chair, I'm not sure how sometimes people sleep at night. You know, I don't know that this is happening and that young women are having to choose to go on Tinder to find places to stay because the shelter is full. That's what my colleague didn't want to allude to but that's what's happening. And I look at myself, and I think back to myself at the age of 16 and how naive and stupid I was, and we're putting it on them to find the solutions. It's -- it is, it's shameful. And I really hope that the people listening are actually going to take this -- what we're saying here and do something with it because I don't actually see anybody in the room listening to it from that department. So therefore hopefully the people that are behind the scenes listening to it are actually listening to us. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Question has been called. All those in favour? All those opposed? Abstentions? The motion is carried.

---Carried

Member for Kam Lake.