NunatsiaqOnline 2016-04-20: NEWS: Inuit regions contain the worst, most overcrowded housing, Senator says

21.4.16

NunatsiaqOnline 2016-04-20: NEWS: Inuit regions contain the worst, most overcrowded housing, Senator says: “I think the degree of overcrowding here is worse than it is, from what I understand, in the rest of the country. Its nothing like we’re hearing about it,” Dyck told Nunatsiaq News during a tour of an Iqaluit housing complex April 18.

In 2014, George Kuksuk, then the minister of the Nunavut Housing Corp., said more than 3,000 new housing units would be needed to meet the territory’s social housing shortfall.

Dyck and five other senators sitting on the committee, including Nunavut Senator Dennis Patterson, plan to visit several communities in the coming days to better understand the unique nature of the North’s housing shortage.

In 2015, the committee completed a similar report about housing on First Nations reserves.

But Dyck says a separate northern report is necessarym as the region differs from the South fundamentally in both resource availability and jurisdiction.