Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The issue of building new highways is always a big concern to a lot of people down the Mackenzie Valley. Being a resident of Fort Simpson myself, I certainly would like to see a highway system eventually. At the present time, any new highway system is the responsibility of the federal government. There is zero dollars in their budget, yet they have that responsibility. The responsibility the department has is to maintain and upgrade the existing systems that we have. The ACCESS road program started off as a small program to assist small communities accessing the area outside the communities. It has been a very successful program in the last few years that has been utilized. There are more and more requests for that particular program. The desire is to look at ways and long-term views of how we could try to develop this infrastructure. The view that I take is we need to develop our infrastructure in the North if we are going to develop our economy. This is the direction that we would like to go as a department.
However, we are short of resources. What we have to do collectively, is to try to find innovative ways of trying to achieve this in the long term. The statement that I made in the opening remarks is to try to set some sort of a focus on what we want to do. We need to develop a transportation strategy. There has been a transportation strategy in place for some time now. In the last government, the department upgraded it a few times to make it relevant at the time. We have to do the same thing here now and look at our transportation system, look at our transportation strategy and see how we could plan for trying to achieve what we would like to do in the future. With the fiscal restraint that we are under and with impeding resource development at our doorsteps, we have to try to find different ways to make this happen.
So I agree with the honourable Member that we have to start looking in that direction. Thank you.