Thank you, Mr. Speaker. You know that I've been advocating for housing for our constituents, and we know that we are in a housing crisis in the Northwest Territories. It's not just in Northwest Territories. It's across Canada we know we are in a really bad situation to provide more affordable housing and to increase housing stock, especially in small communities.
In small communities, we never heard of homelessness before, but lately we do have a lot of homelessness and we have warming shelter. Why do we have warming shelter in small communities? If we had more housing to give away to our constituents or for our -- or to provide for our constituents, there would be no need for warming shelter. And I know that there are some people in the small communities, they are against the warming shelter because it doesn't do anything to help to provide more housing. It creates more of a homelessness. That's what I've been hearing from people in small communities.
And we know that there's a lot of people on the waitlist as well. There's a lot of families. We have families of six, with six children that were on the waitlist recently, and there are -- and there are some people who have been on the waitlist for more than two years, and those are the ones that I've been advocating for and they're still on the waitlist. Even for single unit, we don't have enough unit to allocate to our constituents that really deserve. A lot of them just want their own place. Once -- I know that having no home does have an impact on mental health. It really does affect their mental health, and that's where we know that there's a lot of problems with addictions. And it does have an impact on the well-being of a child. And because of -- because there's not enough housing, a lot of our kids are in care. Some parents, they give up their children voluntarily to the system because there's no housing for them, no home for them. And those things have to stop. And for that reason, I really do support and I'm very grateful, thankful, to Deh Cho and to Range Lake, yes, to Range Lake, for bringing this motion forward that it is -- it is a fundamental human right. So thank you.