Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I also support the efforts to build the Mackenzie Valley Highway. I have worked closely with the Mackenzie Aboriginal Corporation, which has put a lot of time and effort into looking at how they can develop this proposal realizing that it is going to be a major capital endeavour. Through partnerships from the Deh Cho to the Sahtu to the Gwich’in settlement area to the Inuvialuit settlement area to construct a highway from Wrigley all the way to Tuktoyaktuk is a dream that people in the valley have had for years.
We all hear what the high cost of living is in our small communities and, more importantly, in our isolated communities and communities that have to be served by winter roads. In order for us to reduce the real cost of living, we have to improve our infrastructure. With the challenges we’re facing today with global warming and the shorter seasons that we’re seeing with regard to being able to build roads and service our communities it’s getting shorter every year.
The Mackenzie Highway has cost this government about a million dollars a year in regard to opening the winter roads and maintaining those roads. Yes, we’ve invested some $41 million into bridges and I believe that is a start, but in order for this project to go forward it will take a lot of capital investment from the private sector, the Government of Canada, and the Government of the Northwest Territories. As a government we should push forward a major infrastructure problem in the Northwest Territories where we’re looking at somewhere in the range of $1.8 billion to construct this length of highway.
We do have to think outside the box. The federal government has been taking royalties and revenues from the old Norman Wells field going back some 50 years. Yet those revenues flow directly to the federal coffers. The federal government owns one-third of the Norman Wells field in which the revenues are somewhere in the range of $200 million a year. Yet I believe that’s where the investment should come from. The federal government should reinvest those dollars that they’ve taken out of the northern economy. Just to drill one well in the Mackenzie Valley costs somewhere around $30 million. We have to do better.
With that, I will support this endeavour and thank the Members.