The minister responsible for NL Housing says repairing public rental units is a “top priority.”

Joedy Wall was responding to AG Denise Hanrahan’s report showing that waitlists for NL Housing expanded by 71 per cent between 2021 and 2025, and that the number of available units had dropped.

Wall says the previous government eliminated 14 positions back in 2018, and he wonders had those cuts not been made, whether the housing inventory would have been facing the shortfalls it’s facing today.

“Four of the 14 positions; one is Director of Administration and Property Services, second Manager of Property Management, third Assistant Manager of Modernization, Improvement and Vacancies, and the fourth, Provincial Maintenance Co-Ordinator. All of those positions certainly have vital roles in the success of Newfoundland and Labrador Housing.”

Wall says government is committed to building 10,000 new homes, and he says NL Housing needs the proper amount of staff to get the job done.

“We cannot expect two or three people to do the work of 20 people. It just doesn’t work that way. So we’re going to remediate and repair our housing units that we have, get them back into our stock, and get people moved into those” he told reporters yesterday.

“We have people who could certainly move into those units, and we’ve got to get them repaired. I understand there’s a cost associated with everything, but we need to get that done in short order to get people in those units and give them a safe place to live.”