Finance Minister Lorne Kusugak announced Tuesday in the legislative assembly that Government of Nunavut employees’ monthly residency allowance will rise to $1,000 from the current rate of $400 starting April 1. (File photo)
GN employees to get $600 hike in monthly residency allowance
Current rate has been in place since 2008
Government of Nunavut employees will see an increase to their monthly residency allowance payments starting April 1.
The current rate of $400 per month has been in place since 2008, said Finance Minister Lorne Kusugak in the legislative assembly Tuesday. In April, that will rise to $1,000 per month.
“This increase provides an additional incentive and support for GN employees who own or rent their homes on the private market,” he said during his minister’s statement.
Kusugak said the increase is in line with the current government’s mandate to make home ownership and private rentals more affordable for Nunavummiut.
He said it also aligns with Nunavut 3000, the government’s plan to ease the territory’s severe housing shortage by building 3,000 new housing units by the end of this decade.
“Supporting and encouraging staff to move from subsidized housing to own homes of their own is a key focus,” Kusugak said.
……After taxes are paid it will be $600 from $1000….more taxes towards the photoshoots I guess
are you saying you would rather NOT get an increase to keep your taxes down?!?
Holy s–t it’s about time the government did something to promote private homeownership. I tried to do an ATIPP request to DoF back around 2020 asking for the reasoning behind the $400 amount and was told I was not able to ATIPP the information because it was a Cabinet decision and was privy to Cabinet confidentiality. The GN has forever been hemorrhaging money to staff housing and not compensating market renters/buyers at nearly the same rate for doing them a favour.
The allowance, whether $400 or $600 only promotes home ownership for government staff. The rest of us still have to cope with the outrageous cost of heat and electricity.
Stop whining over everything, this is a good thing. Just because it includes someone else other than yourself you whine about it. We already get our oil subsidy and electricity is cheap here in Iqaluit.
Increasing the liquidity in the private market is important. Reducing the dominance of the staff housing segment is important.
Whether this will move the needle and do so in a cost-effective way are legitimate questions, but it’s worth a try.
To ensure its effectiveness, they might look at ways to limit access to staff housing for senior managers – give them a year at subsidized rate, then it jumps to full market rate and that $1,000 starts to look really good.
As GN staff in staff housing, I wonder why I am not taxed on paying about 50% of what NHC is paying the landlord.
I think it is great that the GN is taking steps to compensate GN employees better for living in their own homes or in market rented homes. BUt I am left to wonder what is the GN doing to help non-GN employees with the ridiculous cost of renting or home ownership in Nunavut (Iqaluit in my case). Making home ownership more affordable for Nunavummiut as a stated aim in this article, applies to many others that are not GN employees but are still overwhelmed by the artificially inflated cost. Those rental cost are inflated in a large part because of the GN’s monopoly on housing in cities and hamlets such as Iqaluit. And it makes it more expensive for everyone, not just GN employees. Again aligning with the Nunavut 3000 strategy to ease the housing shortage, with a majority of new homes being built destined for public housing does nothing to support Nunavummiut that own their own homes or are paying market rent in Nunavut. What about them?
Why not ALL residents who want to be homeowners? Where is the support for homeownership if you are a resident? It is about time to make things fair.
It is already difficult that homeowners and staff housing tenants are not treated equally and the staff housing is protected without facing the increases that homeowners have to face.
Indeterminate GN employees get this allowance. Casuals do not. In my office, there are 12 employees. 3 are indeterminate, 9 are casual. Of those 9, 5 have been there for 4 years or more, and the rest have been there for over a year. The manager has tried like crazy to change this situation, but HR and bureaucracy prevent logic from prevailing.
Violating the CA by being casual for that long. Union will be weak. Anyone who had held a job four years should just apply to an indeterminate position at another department and move on.
Money money money! It’s a rich man’s world. If you have buddies in GN and work with GN
This is long overdue. I like how everyone complains about some people getting something that they don’t get. Maybe you should look in the mirror and think about all the handouts, benefits and freebies you get all year long from the Fed Gov, NTI, ITK, NCC, MC and the list goes on and on… let someone else get a freebie for once.
Make Public Housing more affordable too for the people who pay the max rent.
$600 more per employee x 12 months is $7,200.00 additional cost per year.
There were 7,200 GN employees in 2021. Perhaps more now. However, based on 2021 staff size, this additional benefit total cost per year would be $51.8M.
This is more money than the GN spends on Nunavut Arctic College. It is almost double how much GN has estimated for school construction over the next year. It uses up all the revenue plus more that the GN expects to take in with the entire Nunavut Payroll tax. It is double what the GN is spending on the Nunavut Recovery Center. It is $10M less than what GN spends every year on the entire Income Support program.
There is no context in the story or provided by the government for anyone to have an informed opinion on whether this was a good thing to do or not.
The overall cost of this measure is not mentioned.
The comparative size of this financial commitment to GN staff only is only left to the imagination.
Because of this, people are mainly left to only compare this to the most obvious thing – what else that the GN is doing to support homeownership. However, as you can see, this is the least of their options. They could have for example, effectively ended food insecurity for the unemployed in Nunavut for the same amount.
If we are going to have a truly responsible and public government here in this territory, we are going to have to do better showing how these very important decisions and choices on using tax dollars are made.