If I could add to that, my office is in the Victoria Faulkner Women's Centre, which is a women's drop-in centre. On average, I'd say we get a woman coming in there on a daily basis who has nowhere to live. We had women coming in there last winter at minus 50 degrees Celsius who were living in trucks, just camper trucks, or in the cab of their truck, or in a van, or in a cabin that had no windowpanes in the windows or a door that blew open in the wind, etc. These women are not on the waiting list for Yukon Housing. There are very many women who are not on the waiting list for Yukon Housing because they know they would be at the bottom of the list, and it's just another situation that creates more despair.
We have another agency in town called the Grey Mountain Housing Society, which supplies urban aboriginal housing. They're in dire straits. They received no funds from the last federal transfers for housing. A lot of their units are going to be decommissioned for the same reasons Yukon Housing units are being decommissioned: it's just not economically feasible to fix them up any more. I think their projection was that by 2012 they may have no units left.
I don't know where all the people who are living in those homes are supposed to be going, and where all the aboriginal people who continue to come to Whitehorse looking for safety or a better economic opportunity or education are supposed to live. As you know, each first nation is responsible for its own housing.
The current additions Yukon Housing is making to social housing in the Yukon may eliminate the waiting list, but the waiting list does not reflect the reality of the housing situation here in the north. We don't have any minimal rental standards, for instance, so people are living in the most incredible third-world-style poverty here. When I was doing my research study, I had a woman tell me she wasn't homeless; she had four walls around her. It didn't have a roof, but she had four walls, and this was in the dead of a Yukon winter.
There needs to be a heck of a lot more done here in the Yukon in order to decrease homelessness or end homelessness. One homeless person is too many.