Mr. Speaker, it's overwhelming. I am thankful for the enormous amount of work that went into the territorial housing needs assessment, but its conclusions are overwhelming. The NWT has a housing deficit of up to 2,700 homes, and that's just to address current needs. Within the next 20 years, we will need another thousand new homes. 71 percent of households in core need are Indigenous. 30 percent of these households are led by single mothers.

Now, this government has done more than many past assemblies on the housing front. We've agreed to $150 million in new investment for Housing NWT and have more transitional housing underway than ever before, both for those coming out of addictions treatment in Yellowknife and Inuvik, and for those coming out of homelessness. But it all seems like a drop in the bucket compared to the need. How do you keep going with good initiatives once you realize how very far you still have to go? How do you keep up the motivation and the momentum?

As an Assembly, we've chosen big priorities: housing, health care, workforce development, the economy. It's easy to list off how many things are going wrong. The first step is usually to get mad and blame someone. The hard part is trying to take action to change things. You pull on one thread and suddenly you are buried in balls of yarn all tied up with those threads. Once we start seeing how big and how complicated the problems are, they're all tied to colonialism, poverty, trauma, racism. There's an understandable instinct to become cynical and defeatist. If we can't do everything, then what's the point of improving just one thing? And if you try to improve one thing, you risk putting a target on your back. How dare you change this but not this other thing that I wanted. It's never going to be enough to satisfy people or meet the whole need so might as well just keep muddling through.

Let's take the opportunity, Mr. Speaker, to look for the critical steps that could start a virtuous cycle of cascading improvements. Let's look for every opportunity to support people in helping themselves, every opportunity to prevent damage and ensure housing is built to last longer. Mr. Speaker, I am not naive to the scale of our challenges but I refuse to be defeatist or get tangled up in the overwhelm. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.