Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I also agree with Mr. Dent on how special warrants are being used. Just a bit of an example is the road for Tuktoyaktuk. If this was the community of Wekweti you would not be able to access this money, you would have to access the funds from Transportation where you are only allowed $50,000 per year.
By using different approaches on how they are putting money into roads that are access roads for the community and using the municipality to fund it, they are getting away with things that other communities could not get away with.
To top it off, you are putting money into this program September 18th or September 26th, everything was frozen already. How do you prepare a frozen road? How do you justify putting money into a frozen road? You cannot go and do road maintenance unless you are doing blast rock, and to say it is a special warrant, you have to set it aside and put it over for next year, and then you can put that into the business plans.
A special warrant is not there to be used at free will for funds to be put into a community because they figure that it will not get by in a different way, access funds or whatever.
This has to be really looked at very closely and I think maybe the Minister and his staff can get us some information on how the road was damaged, how MACA can justify putting in 6.2 kilometres of road and the municipality must be a little smaller than that. Even Yellowknife does not have more than four kilometres either way. So this community must be a very big community, bigger than the size of Hay River and Inuvik to justify for roads within the municipality for 6.2 kilometres. I would like to get more information on this special warrant to see if it was justifiable for the expenditures.
It seems coincidental that the money is spent in the Minister's riding and the Minister is the one that approved that funding. Many questions are coming up here, popping up here. I will give a good example of my community where they could not even put $40,000 into a road for a cost overrun or to expand the bridge, but they are able to put $1.3 million into the community of Tuktoyaktuk. The only way to get money into your community I guess is if you are a Minister. Or, you want to put a road into your riding you have to be a Minister.
I feel that this needs to be looked at more closely and I do not really agree with this. I will have questions on this and I will ask for more information on this warrant. Thank you.