Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Once again, the Member raises a lot of issues that are of concern in his riding. The issue of access road to gravel sources has become very popular or at least a common voiced concern here in this House and at a lot of our meetings. Right now we don’t have a program that allows for investment in roads to gravel sources. It is something that this government hasn’t had. I think the responsibility was devolved over to the municipalities through the New Deal program some years ago. We do have an Access Road Program that has a budget of $300,000 that communities access for various reasons. However, it is very oversubscribed. The budget doesn’t go very far. There has been some discussion through the Rural and Remote committee to see if there is any opportunity to encourage the government or redirect some money so that we could look at access roads to gravel sources. We have four communities in the Northwest Territories right now that have some challenges like finding gravel sources or hauling gravel from identified sources to the communities. I think that is a serious concern. We have to move forward on that.

The Mackenzie Valley Highway, of course, is a priority for this government. The Members of this House voted and passed a motion in this House here to recognize it as a priority. We, as a department, have been trying to find resources to make that move forward. We have hired a company to provide us with an analysis on the economic benefits. That report is in our hands now. The draft that we have looked at, or at least I have looked at, certainly shows that there are some very good returns on investment to create a Mackenzie Valley Highway. We also want to move forward to doing the project description report on all aspects of this road, the whole alignment, and we have identified $1 million for this year’s budget and another million for next year. That still leaves us quite short of what we actually require, which would be a total of $7 million. The federal government has invested in the portion from Tuktoyaktuk to Inuvik to the tune of $975,000, which should allow them to do the project description report. We are still trying to put together a plan to address the rest of the road. The Gwich’in have informed us that they are working with the feds to try to secure some dollars. They may need to come and work with us on finding some action funds. We, as a department, are having discussions or will be approaching the federal government to see if there are any dollars out there in any of the funding sources that are there.

The Member also raised the possibility of looking at a portion of the road to connect communities in his riding and whether the winter road would have to be recognized as part of the national highway system. In my opinion, there are programs that we can tap into for constructing and improving the grade. The new road is still the federal responsibility. The federal government will, of course, dictate how the criteria is drafted; they have up to now on all their programs. We certainly agree that Highway No. 8 is going to continue to need investment. We have enhanced our investment. It is roughly $8 million a year. It is going to probably require about $120 million or $130 million to construct the whole road. It is at the lifecycle that it needs to be reconstructed, so it will get attention. We will continue to provide improvements. Thank you.