Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, yesterday I tabled reports produced by Taylor Architecture Group, which I am proud to say is a YK North business, which examined barriers and solutions towards establishing home building standards designed for the North. It's based on home visits with residents of Ulukhaktok, K'atlodeeche First Nation, and Somba K'e or Trout Lake.

Now, are NWT building standards just more restrictions and red tape?

Without any NWT standards, we either drive up the cost of building homes if you have to hire a professional engineer to design each home from scratch, which also delays the process, or else you buy homes off the shelf that meet southern standards and assumptions. Now, homes designed for the south usually don't include water and sewer tanks for truck services. They're likely to have high-tech digital controls for heating and ventilation for example, but what's the use of that if it suffers a blowout due to an unsteady local power grid and there's no one within a thousand kilometres who could fix it let alone parts available. Southern homes are not designed with appropriate insulation or ventilation to handle extreme cold, high winds, or blowing snow, so residents commonly seal windows and doors with plastic bags or blankets or use improvised fasteners to hold down roofing and siding. And of course there's all kinds of contraptions to stop pipes from freezing.

Now, one of the prototypes in the report is a home designed around a wood stove for those homeowners trying to save money on heating fuel. What often happens now, when a wood stove is just popped in as an afterthought, is that people shut off their high-tech heating and ventilation system, or HVAC, when they fire up their wood stove but this leads to poor air circulation, mould, and health problems.

Now, Mr. Speaker, the point is not to create a new one size fits all. The City of Yellowknife currently has its own set of building standards already, and what works in YK is different from what will work in Ulukhaktok. NWT building standards should be a suite of different pre-approved design options that a community or homeowner could choose from based on their particular environmental and economic conditions and constraints. Mr. Speaker, I ask for unanimous consent to conclude my statement.

---Unanimous consent granted

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So those environmental and economic conditions and constraints could be, for example, whether wood is freely available for heating, whether the home is on permafrost, or what supply chains may be available for energy and construction materials. I believe we have the tools and the personnel in the North that we can move forward with northern homebuilding standards that work for us. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.