Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, at the airport in Yellowknife, there is a service road that is on the airport area that runs parallel to Highway 3 which is a public road and also it is the main public access that goes to the airport. The service road is for the use of the airport operations and business. It is not really there intended to be a public road because there is also, again, there is Highway 3 which is the main public access to the airport. We have two routes into the airport, but the one in question is the public service road on the airport property which the department has seen over the last five years that there were eight collisions that happened on this service road with property damages to the vehicles, as well as there were a number of less serious traffic incidents on this road. Fortunately, there has been no injuries in terms of these minor accidents or major accidents.
With the increase of activity at the airport, which the honourable Member mentioned, there is also increase in traffic on the service road and to go by the department's mandate having safety in the Department of Transportation, then the department looked at this situation and decided to put stop signs on this access road rather than putting speed bumps on there. This decision was made in October of 1997, to put three stops signs on this service road to slow down the higher speed public traffic that was going through there very rapidly. There is also a mix of traffic of the slower moving service and utility vehicles which are just baggage cargo, carts, fuel trucks, maintenance equipment that were also using the service road and it was potentially a very hazardous condition there. So as a result, the department had decided to put these stops signs there to improve the safety standards there. Now, the department is satisfied that we have improved the safety of the local airport traffic using the service road and at the same time we have encouraged the higher speed traffic to use Highway 3 access to the airport which is intended to be used by the public. Thank you.