Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I brought this motion forward as a result of when I was first elected in the 19th Assembly and one of the things that came out of my riding is that housing was a problem. To qualify for a housing corporation program, you pretty well had to shoot an arrow from Yellowknife to hit a board in Lutselk'e and if you hit the middle of the bull's eye, then you could qualify for a program. Well, Mr. Speaker, the policy of the Government of the Northwest Territories just doesn't work for our people in small communities. And as a result of the demand from -- and hearing back from my constituents in small communities, they've asked me to put together a letter to the housing Minister in the 19th Assembly, and which I did. I put in a letter of about over 120 homes that needed urgent repairs, and I never got a reply back for about three or four months.
And at the end of the day, the letter that I got back was that they're saying that this issue is going to be addressed by the Circle of Aboriginal Leaders. And so that was a response to me. So when I go back to my constituents in Fort Resolution who are -- the elders are asking for help, I had to tell them that, sorry, the response -- this is my response back from the Minister, and this is what I had to tell them, what the results were.
But regardless, Mr. Speaker, in the Northwest Territories, prior to 1993 the housing corporation did a really good job in getting money from CMHC and the federal Government of Canada, and they built anywhere from four to 500 homes a year and throughout the Northwest Territories, and that included Nunavut prior to 1999. And so what's happening now, the average life cycle of a house is about 50 years, and before it needs work. But right now, in small communities, we have a lot of houses that are 30 plus years old and in dire need of complete retrofit.
If we don't address this issue now, then the problem is going to come is when these homes is going to be condemned. And they could be condemned by the fire marshal. And if that happens, then it only adds to the overall housing crisis we have here in the Northwest Territories.
So I took it upon myself to recognize that the housing corporation doesn't have the money today to address these homeownership repairs in small communities throughout the Northwest Territories. And so what I did was I put together an idea, thinking outside the box and trying to figure out a way how I could work with Housing NWT and the Minister, trying to figure out a way to resolve this issue. And the only way I could think of it is because I know that they don't have the money to deal with this issue, I thought maybe okay, well let's try something different. I got about 540 homes in my riding, and there's about 200 public housing units. And so the rest is -- we could call them private homes. Those are the ones that I want to look at. And if I'm able to get some SEED money from the housing corporation to undertake the inspections of these units and determine the actual cost to bring up these units to National Building Code standards and then put it all together. And if I'm able to work with the Minister of housing corporation with the Akaitcho Territory government and the NWT Metis Nation in Fort Resolution, we could do this collectively.
And I got support letters from them already. My letters are sitting in the Minister's office right now for support to undertake a project like this. But this motion that I have in front of us now is going to be identical for other regions in the Northwest Territories to step up and maybe work with the Housing NWT because this problem in my riding of Tu Nedhe is no different than all of other five regions in the Northwest Territories. It's the same issue. So the housing issue's not going to go away.
So speaking to the motion, this is something that is needed. When I put my letter together on March 15th, 2024, outlining my priorities for my riding, again housing is still the number one issue. And it turns out now that the priority of this government is housing is the number one issue. So I'm being proactive, trying to think outside the box and put together if we work with the Housing NWT in partnership with Indigenous governments, then we all can hit the bull's eye together. So that's something I'm thinking outside the box. So, Mr. Speaker, to the motion, that's why I brought this forward. Thank you.