Thank you for that information. Looking in the Inuvik Drum today, it still strikes me looking kind of like a half moon. I get what you’re saying, and I understand the importance of this building. Like I said before, I am going to support it. It comes back to some things I heard earlier this session about our capital getting out of hand from time to time. Maybe it’s time that we walked away from pretty buildings. Maybe it’s time that we
started talking about buildings that are based on form and function and reducing our costs.
Like I said, boxes are cheaper to build. You know, I don’t want to knock the beauty of the proposal for this school you’re building in Inuvik, but a box would have been cheaper, and we would have been able to fit the same number of classes. We probably would have found convenient ways to heat it, and we would have had a good school with the classrooms required to educate the children of the North. It didn’t need to be most beautiful thing on Earth.
For future reference — I am going to throw it out there — we’re going to keep building schools in the Northwest Territories. We’re still going to need hospitals. We’re still going to need community health centres. There are a lot of things we are going to be building over the years, and I would like to see us get a little bit away from “let’s build something incredibly beautiful” to “let’s build something that is practical, makes sense and will last in the northern economy based on the realities that we are facing,” which includes things like global warming and the price of oil. If we keep trying to build these grand, beautiful buildings, we are going to cause a lot of damage to ourselves and to our bank account in very short order.
So no real question there, but I am throwing it out there, because we need to seriously think about it, and we need to make sure that what we are building is practical and is the right building to build. It doesn’t need to be the most beautiful.
I do have one question. A lot of these estimates, I understand, were based on market information for the last year or so when oil was quite bit a higher. Oil has dropped, so does that mean we will see any sort of savings in the construction of this if the oil price stays down where it is now for a portion of the construction year?