Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I, too, am going to support this motion here, as Mr. Ramsay has indicated, in terms of having some transparency in this government in terms of having some discussion. I, too, see the benefits of the Deh Cho Bridge being built across the Mackenzie River, as I also have aspirations for a Great Bear River bridge being built across our land, and
other bridges that need to be built down the Mackenzie Valley here.
Mr. Speaker, I, too, was quite amazed how this project received quite a lot of attention in the last couple of weeks. I know we have gotten some other briefings in some other rooms on this project here, and the reason for this is it's all of a sudden we're deciding to build it. Well, we in the smaller communities are asking for special initiatives to be built in our regions such as other programs we could list off, but, Mr. Speaker, that's not the point here. The point is that we want some open, transparent discussions on mega projects. This is not just Fort Providence or areas around Yellowknife. This is a Northwest Territories project. When you look at projects down the Mackenzie Valley, in the Gwich'in or the Beaufort-Delta or the Sahtu, we seem to have that, well, it's a territorial project, we have to have some discussion. This one is a P3 project that's being negotiated with the community of Fort Providence under the corporate act that gives them some legal authority, legal powers, to work on this. But it's a Northwest Territories project, also. Mr. Speaker, the things I'd like to look at is if you change the physical landscape of the Mackenzie River, you know you change the people, you change the way of life, and this bridge here will certainly do that to the people in Fort Providence who are on ground zero. What are some of the things we could look out for them in terms of if this is a project that is being built in one of our small communities, are we preparing ourselves for this community, because it's at ground zero, for lots of social impacts, for the economic benefits that would come off this project? It's just like any other projects I have witnessed in our region. There are good impacts and then there are also some negative impacts in the region. So that's the thing I wanted to ask this government here in terms of how are we preparing the people and the way of life. I mean there are things in there that said they have the environmental and the water licence approved, but the way of life for the people on the river here. So those things I want to look at, Mr. Speaker.
One of the things that I heard from the Members here is in terms of the break-up of the Mackenzie River and how it puts some hardships onto some of the people outside the area that use the ferry, such as the city of Yellowknife and Providence and some of the Tlicho communities, even the areas around the Nahendeh. Our communities in the Sahtu are isolated pretty well, in terms of that type of transportation, for about eight months. We just don't seem to have a priority to have them catch up to the other regions in terms of this type of infrastructure. There's lots of things we could do, so I'm very surprised as to how this project got bumped right up without any type of secure commitment from the federal government and we're going to pay one way or another.
So, Mr. Speaker, I look forward to a good debate on this. Like Mr. Ramsay has indicated, we need some good debate, we need some good discussions on this in the House as a whole, otherwise these projects would go under the radar if we didn't catch them in time to say let's have some open discussion on this project.