Canada’s auditor general says her office is about to scrutinize the Northwest Territories’ main housing agency.
The NWT has been in a housing crisis for years. Government statistics suggest nearly half of the territory’s homes are either unsuitable for the number of people living there, inadequate in their state of disrepair, or unaffordable in the first place.
Tens of millions of dollars in primarily federal funding has been invested in NWT housing in recent years. Some of that has been provided to the GNWT. Increasingly, federal housing cash is heading directly to Indigenous governments.
Despite that investment, the perception of many northerners is that an appropriate home is hard to find.
On Monday, auditor general Karen Hogan appeared before MPs to discuss her office’s recent audit of housing in First Nations communities across southern Canada.
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That audit, the fourth since 2003 regarding First Nations housing, found that “Indigenous Services Canada and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation have made little progress in supporting First Nations to improve housing conditions in their communities.”
However, the audit focused on housing in the south and on reserve, not in northern communities. With two exceptions, communities in the NWT are not reserves.
The NWT’s Liberal MP, Michael McLeod, questioned Hogan about that on Monday, asking why northern First Nations were considered out of scope for her audit.
In response, Hogan said northern communities were excluded “because this was about funding to communities on reserves.” But she added that an audit specific to housing in the NWT was coming up.
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“We looked more precisely at Yukon housing in 2023, and it is our intention to look at housing in the Northwest Territories in 2024,” she said, going on to suggest such an audit might roll out in the fall.
Hogan’s national office serves as auditor general for the three territories, which don’t have their own auditors as the provinces do. Every year or two, her office conducts an audit of some aspect of the NWT government. Recent ones include addictions services in the NWT and the territory’s education system.
According to the auditor general’s website, an audit for the NWT is already scheduled for publication this year: an examination of the Stanton Renewal project, which involved the building of a new territorial hospital in Yellowknife.
MLAs in the NWT legislature voted in 2020 for the auditor general to review the hospital build.
It is considered to be, at least in financial terms, the largest capital project the NWT has ever undertaken.
At the time, then-Thebacha MLA Frieda Martselos said auditing the hospital’s construction would “ensure public funds are being used for the right reasons.”
Hogan’s comments on Monday suggest an audit of Housing NWT will follow close behind the Stanton Renewal audit.
