Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Through the Minister Roland or directly I'd like to see if the client department, ECE, could help committee out with some of the background on this.
Mr. Chairman, as the Minister has just outlined, we do have a capital planning process. It normally takes a year or two of discussion and negotiation and preparation to even get a particular project in the cycle of, I guess competition with other projects before it may finally land on our desks here and we can actually approve a project. So it is a multi-year situation. The kind of project that the Deh Cho Hall is, is I guess a very routine, very ordinary kind of a project from a capital planning process, Mr. Chairman. We should have anticipated this or could have anticipated that this would be before us and potentially even work well underway, if not completed by now.
As we learned yesterday, Mr. Chairman, the departments have been dealing with this situation since 2002, at least three, maybe four years ago now, and nothing appeared on the routine capital planning process to give us a suggestion that we should be paying attention to this and doing something about it. Yet today we have this ultimatum before us that a major piece of Fort Simpson's government infrastructure is going to be padlocked and shut down unless we all of a sudden shift all of our process, Mr. Chairman, all of the rules and procedures that have been very carefully built up over time to enable us to make good decisions, all of those rules and procedures and conventions have been swept aside and we have this gun to our heads.
This is the part of this process that I'm really, really unhappy with. What I wanted to find out about from the client department here relates to the kind of involvement that they have had in this and what they did or did not subsequently do. So I wanted to look especially, Mr. Chairman, at the role or the advice that it was getting from the fire marshal's office that if the difficulties with the Deh Cho Hall have been basically flagged and under some kind of review since 2002, how is it that now, within the last few weeks, the fire marshal has laid this ultimatum down? Mr. Chairman, what advice did the fire marshal give ECE as the client department on timing or deadlines to bring the building up to code? Mr. Chairman.