Thank you, Madam Chair. On the fiscal policy, I think I am going to skip over the questions about macroeconomic position because I think I got enough information out of that. I am going to speak to the budget writing and an element in the budget, and go right to page 5 and the conversion of workforce housing.
I don't want to repeat all of the stuff I have said here, and I think it would be much more productive for us to just be less pro and con about this project and look at it as a fiscal or economic project that we need to all pay attention to, because I know that the Minister wants to do good and he would do his due diligence to make sure that we don't leave behind any boondoggles, so I am going to help him along with that. Now that the Minister has put this idea into the budget, what are the next steps and what are the next milestones that would determine the moving along of the project if it does move along? What, if any, dollar commitments were made in that MOA or MOU? The attachment said MOA, but I understand, from talking to other Ministers, that it was an MOU. I understand that it had to do with the confidentiality of the product itself so that you are not talking about a product to other people. When I say that we should be looking at other ideas, I don't mean to take that product idea around and see if other people could do the same thing. That is never my intention of anything. I meant in just talking about looking at other options and if there are other companies that could produce something equally good or better. Unless you ask, how do you know? I think that there still should be due diligence done to see if this is, in fact, the best way to go.
I would like to know what other steps that we need to take and also, the most important thing, I have had a chance to talk to developers and builders. Actually, I have talked to about eight, nine or 10 businesses in town, people who are much more acquainted about this sort of thing. I have talked to financial people, bankers who could do calculations by the millions. For me, as soon as it goes over $10,000 or whatever, I can't do all that math.
I think even the people who are most supportive of this proposal still have questions about the liability issue. There are people who feel that, even if all the details of that project go well as presented, we are talking about D estimate. So you have a lot more details to work out and usually moving from D estimate to A estimate, chances are that you are going to see costs changing and rising. There are lots of unknowns when you are talking about a project this massive. We have cost inflation issues, whether we are building in this project with 2006 dollars and it won't be until 2012 before this gets done. There might be some delay, for whatever reason. It could be weather issues, ice road issues. They may not be able to find the people; the freight costs might go up. There are all sorts of variables that could be beyond the control of anybody. We have seen lots of projects in Yellowknife that went way over cost overrun without any fault of anybody. I understand that the Deh Cho Bridge project...You know, the cost of stuff go up beyond control. I understand that the proposal, as it is presented, really assumes most of the liability. It gives most of the liability if something goes wrong or any unforeseen circumstances to the GNWT. I would like to know if the Minister has done risk liability analysis and how would he make sure that he is comfortable with the level of risk that we are assuming? I understand any project has risks, but there are different kinds of risks, and there are people who are trained to do fiscal risk analysis and such. There are a number of questions there that I would like the Minister to address for me. Thank you, Madam Chair.