Thank you, Mr. Chair. I certainly do appreciate the comments from the MLA. He was very aware of the situation that happened on the Liard Highway this past year. As I explained before, it was really a series of events that led up to the problems that occurred from section 100 to 125, about a 25 kilometre stretch of road that just, you know, essentially because of the wet fall that we had the year before, because of the way the snow melted in the spring…. It just created all kinds of challenges for us to maintain the surface, coupled with perhaps the lack of the granular surface topping material that was on the road. So we were challenged with that.
We did have a couple of projects in the capital plan in the 2008–2009 fiscal year to deal with Liard Highway. The first was some money that was under the CSIF program, as the Member mentioned there,
where we were constructing from kilometre zero to kilometre 20, a benefit for the folks from Fort Liard in their travels south.
We also had another million dollars in the capital plan last year and this current year to take a look and start putting more surfacing material on the remainder of the highway so we could try to get ahead of this type of challenge. That’s essentially why we didn’t need any extraordinary funding last year; we already had a million dollars in the capital plan to address that type of work. We said that at contractor capacity and then our own staff capacity, we knew we couldn’t spend any more than the million dollars, so we used that to direct it to the work that’s required.