Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, today I want to talk about public housing in the NWT. For the past 30 years, the federal government has been trying to get people across the country to move out of public housing and, at the same time, they've been reducing funding with the expectation that they're plan will work, that the need for public housing will disappear. There have been a long list of programs designed to incentivize homeownership and funds to dramatically increase market housing.

But this approach, this theory of how things are supposed to work, simply hasn't worked in the NWT. A big reason is that most of our communities do not have functioning housing markets. It cost many times more to build a new home in a small community than a homeowner could ever resell the house for. So the moment it's built, a home becomes more of a liability than an asset.

Another reality is that the median personal income of people in our small communities is significantly lower than the cost of just maintaining and living in a home, never mind the cost of acquiring that home in the first place.

It's a myth that there's a huge number of people currently in public housing who will be just fine on their own, if someone, maybe just Indigenous governments, just built them a home. In a case study in one small community, about 40 percent of households could afford to maintain their own homes. We absolutely need more homeownership opportunities, but there are real limits on how many people can afford to take on the cost of homeownership.

A 2019 survey showed that almost a quarter of NWT households are in core need, meaning the household income is below the core need threshold. So that's over 3500 households. Currently, we have about 2400 households in NWT public housing. We also have a waiting list of almost 900 people. So those numbers show us that a large part of our NWT population will continue to depend on public housing for the foreseeable future, and it's important to remember that that is not due to the choices or the personal failings of those public housing residents. It is the system that has made homeownership and wage employment unattainable for such a large part of our population. It's not the fault of those people.

We cannot continue to deny that there's a need to increase the number of public housing units, and denying this reality is only costing us more money. Mr. Speaker, I ask for unanimous consent to just conclude my statement.

---Unanimous consent granted

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So denying this reality is costing us more money as we scramble to deal with increasing homelessness, poor education, poor health, and low employment, that are all rooted in poor housing. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.