Thank you, Mr. Chairman. To the first point, as the Minister indicated, our hopes are that the federal government funding that was announced in the February 28th budget, specifically for highway infrastructure on the national highway system, will provide some additional funding.
At this point, we are pursuing the issue with the federal government. There are meetings being held this week by teleconference. I understand our finance officials from the Department of Finance are meeting with the treasury board next week to discuss that, with the hope of establishing a principal, which has been communicated previously by Ministers of Finance, Ministers of Transportation, to set a minimum criteria of funding for smaller jurisdictions across the country.
With that, we hope the funding level would be much more relevant to implementation rather than a small amount that really does not mean anything in this type of a highway job, to a level in the order of a half million at least, that could make this project change in terms of the time it would take to complete. Otherwise, it becomes somewhat ineffective in terms of delivering. Adding a few dollars is not going to finish this job any sooner because of the scale of the project.
With regard to the second question, in terms of tendering practices used by the department, the department, through its industry discussions, identified the best approach of using design-build contracts for very large scale projects, especially those that are complicated by the nature of construction such as we have here between Rae and Yellowknife.
We do that to basically get the best contract options available from the industry. One contractor may identify a cheaper solution through a design approach. That is what we found in our last round when we did this type of a tender.
The tendering timetable at this point is underway. Contract requests for expressions of interest proceeded in February and have already closed. Three proponents were identified. Subject to approval of the interim appropriation, the next stage would be initiated, which is the final design-build proposal submissions by those three pre-qualified contractors. Those are expected to be submitted by the second week of June, with a contract awarded by late June, early July. Contracting to commence probably by mid-summer.
As this is a multi-year project, the contract work would proceed over the period of summer, winter and into the next season. Therefore, in terms of scheduling, it will arrive at the same completion date regardless of what approach was taken. We are going to see the best in terms of savings by having contractors provide their best approach to finishing the work. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.