Nunavut housing minister promises change

Nunavut's housing minister is promising improvements at the territory's housing corporation, after an independent audit revealed how a housing initiative racked upmassive cost overruns.

Tagak Curley was responding to a Deloitte and Touche audit report, released last week, which examined how the Nunavut Housing Corp. had $60 million in cost overruns at the Nunavut Housing Trust over the past four years.

The federal government had assigned the housing corporation in 2006 with managing the $200-million trust, which aims to have 725 public housing units built in Nunavut's 25 communities.

The Deloitte and Touche audit found that housing corporation officials had rushed to create the housing trust's budget, which ended up underestimating construction-related costs.

It also said the housing corporation had no way of tracking the trust's costs over multi-year projects.

"There should have been provisions for analyzing [the] budget each year," Curley, the minister responsible for the Nunavut Housing Corp., told CBC News in an interview.

"When you have that length of an agreement, over four years, you know very well that certain things are going to change."

New management team

Curley said a new management team is in place at the Nunavut Housing Corp. and changes are being made to the way the agency manages its funds.

Among other things, the Deloitte and Toucheaudit revealed a critical staff shortage at the housing corporation, as well as a lack of communication between the agency's offices in Iqaluit and Arviat.

The audit report came out not long after another major case of overspending was revealed at the Nunavut Housing Corp. last month.

In the latest case, about $50 million in cost overruns were found in a $100-million federal affordable housing initiative that was announced in March 2009.

The Nunavut government passed a plan in June to trim money from different departmental budgets to cover the $60-million shortfall related to the Nunavut Housing Trust.

Tagak has said the territorial government can fund part of the $50-million shortfall without going into debt. However, details of how that overrun will be addressed have yet to be announced.