Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, my Member’s statement today is about the condition of the highway from the Alberta/NWT border to Hay River. The Minister, when I told him I was going to do a statement on this, asked me not to mention the outhouses. It would be hard to mention them because I don’t think there are any on that particular stretch of highway.

---Laughter

Much to my disappointment.

Anyway, Mr. Speaker, from the border to Hay River, you can tell when you cross the border from Alberta into the NWT. I don’t know if the roads are constructed differently, if they are made out of different materials, but there is a marked difference and I have heard that this is also the case if you are passing from Alberta into Saskatchewan. But, Mr. Speaker, I am not an MLA in Saskatchewan so I’m not going to worry about their problems.

When you come across into the Territories, the speed limit drops from 100 down to 90. That is one measure that we took to address the conditions. The shoulders disappear. They aren’t even sharp shoulders. There are just no shoulders. And, Mr. Speaker, no more roadside turnouts either.

Probably most obvious is the condition of the road itself during the winter. Just this past week again,

the daughter of a constituent coming home for the weekend from Grande Prairie got to around the falls and hit an unexpected patch of ice. I saw the vehicle, Mr. Speaker, and it is obvious that it bounced from snowbank to snowbank like a pinball and the damage was extensive on the front and on the back and, by the grace of God, the occupants of the vehicle were not injured.

Mr. Speaker, I am not saying that accidents don’t occur south of our border, but in the winter there is almost always this marked difference in the condition of the road when you hit that border. I am not sure of all the reasons, but we must do things differently in terms of our road maintenance.

I will have questions for the Minister about this during question period today. Do we have different plow trucks than they have in Alberta? Do we not apply certain products to our road that they apply in Alberta? I don’t know what they put on the roads; salt, calcium.

Mr. Speaker, the bottom line is that we cannot control the weather, but I think we must do everything in our power to try to make our roads safe for the travelling public, and later in question period I will have questions for the Minister of Transportation on how we can enhance this. Thank you.