Thank you, Mr. Chair. Yeah, I’m
belabouring it too, for a bit.
Clearly, there is an unconscionable amount of greenhouse gas emissions from the mines for which we lapsed our responsibility on doing environmental assessment and allowed it to proceed. We have a responsibility to do something about it.
I support this project. I am interested in discussion of the routing and where the costs and benefits lie. I think that’s been well expressed on this side of the House. We’d enjoy the opportunity to learn more and contribute, and we all have our biases.
The fact of the matter is we do have a narrow window of opportunity when the diamond mines will be interested, beyond which it’s not economic for them. So we have to march to that drum.
The cost of the highway route — if I can call it the western route versus the eastern route, standardize our terminology here…. Mr. Krutko raised some real issues. Personally, I can’t understand the higher costs of the western route, where we clearly have access with our highway infrastructures, versus the eastern route, where there’s no infrastructure for access, and costs should be much, much, much greater. But Mr. Krutko has raised the possibility that they are costs associated with crossing land owned by others. If that’s the case, we need to know about that and we need to weigh those costs and see if there is a role for the territorial government to participate, as the Premier has mentioned.
I’ll leave it at that. I think we do need to go forward with this project somehow. To me, this investment of $5 million, I think we could recoup that easily along the west side where we have highway access, if there are not these other hidden costs.
But something has said that the western route is more expensive, and that’s what we need to flesh out and learn about to get us all sort of started on the same page, anyway. So I guess just to throw in a question: will the Minister commit to helping us fill in those details?