And good day to you, Mr. Jacobson. Next we have Mr. Hawkins.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I just want to echo my comments. I always find the Department of Transportation quite responsive to many of my concerns, so I should put that on record. Although, the Minister always seems to give me a hard time, the staff’s efforts seem to make up for that. Thank you.

---Laughter

Mr. Chairman, points of order are the next item on the agenda.

Mr. Chairman, the Minister highlighted some interesting things in his opening comments and I just wanted to sort of acknowledge them. I’d like to hear a little more under the Transportation Licence Plate Program to find out when exactly that launch is predicted. A couple of years ago I suggested that we use our tourism catch phrase on our licence plate and I’m not sure what’s evolved from that other than the fact that the Licence Plate Program would start off with some new ones and I’m just curious if we’ve gone with a bit of a tourism catch line or a look and feel instead of saying “Explore Canada’s Arctic,” because, as I said at the time over three years ago, that the Northwest Territories doesn’t really represent Canada’s Arctic anymore. Even though we do have some Arctic, that isn’t our

primary focus. We have much more to our Territory than that.

Mr. Chairman, as Mr. Jacobson said, it’s nice to see the road to Tuktoyaktuk really get moving with a gravel source process. I know I’ve supported that initiative since I’ve been here and we’re here almost seven years later and we’re really hearing that that’s finally moving forward.

I just want to speak in favour, as the Minister has highlighted, I want to speak in favour of the work that’s being done to date in partnership with Indian and Northern Affairs on the Mackenzie Valley Highway that will help sort of identify logistics and understand the problem as people prepare to say what work needs to be done, whether it’s technical aspects, environmental aspects or whatnot. I just want to emphasize my support for that project because I think in the long run that will continue to be an asset to our Canadian infrastructure, not just territorial, but Canadian infrastructure. I’ve often thought that that highway, of course, does a lot of things. It opens up a tourism corridor, it opens up a corridor between communities, which unite families. It also helps with the cost of living. So I think it would be a good day for our Territory to finally fulfill Diefenbaker’s dream of the road to resources, because industry tells me that they’re looking for ways to help make their projects cost effective and certainly transportation always factors into these problems, followed by the cost of energy. But the road is a significant component of this situation.

Just on the same note, the roadwork toward the Slave Geological Province, I’m not too convinced at this moment that that’s going to be the end all and be all for the existing diamond mines. I think the problem is it’s going to come into usefulness during the end of their sort of life, but what I think it will do, though, speaking of the whole industry, is it will help the industry again find new ways to do business, it will open up new corridors for development when it comes to resources. So by and large, though, I think that will help continue to provide an anchor to our economy for new ways of drawing new industry to our North. So that road certainly will be a significant development and will change the way we do business as well.

Lastly, I’m not trying to use a lot of time here, Mr. Chairman, I’d like to place a chord or two in the area of the bridge. I know it’s gotten a lot of flack over the last few days and my position right now at this time, until I’m convinced one way or the other, is comfortably in a position of we need to get this project completed. I think, as I’ve said time and time again, legacy infrastructure is always plagued with problems whether its cost or technical issues, people are for it, people are against it. Regardless, once the project is done, once the first couple cars go across that piece of infrastructure, I think people will be going across it thinking why didn’t we do this

before, what took us so long. I mean, as most infrastructure projects go, it’s not unusual for them to have price adjustments. Although this will have a full accounting over time, I have no doubt that there’s going to be some people looking back to say what happened here or how could we do projects differently and, most certainly, how can we do projects better. This will be another example of building Canada and that’s my point of view on this particular project. It’s an essential project to the continued building of our North.

I’ll say, with some disappointment, that the federal government has never come forward to assist this government with this type of cost. If we were a province and we had a truckload of MPs or a whack of senators or those types of things, you know, I mean, they’d be at our doorstep saying how can we help with this type of infrastructure. It’s a shame that we only have one senator and certainly it’s a shame we only have one MP. Of course, at this time, our MP doesn’t even represent the party that’s in power at this time. So the likelihood of getting an investment on this project is obviously none.

I really wish we were in a different situation today to have the support of our federal government on this particular project. I hope once it’s done everyone is able to look forward and say it certainly had a rough ride as such but it will become a legacy project for the North because, as I’ve emphasized a few times, people build infrastructure of this kind with real vision. They dare to dream and they certainly take the leap that is sometimes required. I’m not going to sit here and complain about it. We’ve got a lot of positive things we can do and I look forward to hopefully continuing on that type of tone. That’s all I have to say in my opening remarks.

Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. General comments. I guess I’d like to call first on the Minister to respond to general comments.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I thank all the Members for providing us their comments and input and raising issues that are of concern to them.

First of all I want to respond to the comment made that this department is too busy with the Deh Cho Bridge to pay attention to other areas. That’s not correct. We have one full-time position and another half-time position that are dedicated to working on the issues around the Deh Cho Bridge. We have other staff that also have responsibilities, such as Deputy Minister Russell Neudorf and other staff that do it on an interim basis.

Last year we had a capital budget of $125 million and we certainly focused on delivering all the projects to the best of our abilities. We had many other initiatives, including working on the PDR and working with the communities on the Mackenzie Valley winter road. I’m proud to say that we’ve

moved that initiative the furthest that any government in the life of the NWT has been that able to.

We have also probably been criticized for initiatives such as roads to gravel sources that are outside our mandate. We opened that door when we started working with communities in partnership, first of all with the community of Tuktoyaktuk. We felt this was a good jumping off point to bring attention to the Mackenzie Valley Highway system. It certainly has worked. We invested money through the Building Canada Fund and it has garnered attention from the federal government. They have come forward, first of all, with money for the PDR from Inuvik to Tuk and now for the whole Mackenzie Valley Road. We are still working with communities on that front. We have worked with Aklavik on their desire to see some studies done. We’ve put a couple hundred thousand dollars towards the community study. That’s done. We have also helped them put together a proposal, draft correspondence through several meetings, and the MLA for Mackenzie Delta was at some of them. Now we have a package that’s ready for submission to the federal government. They have reviewed it and I believe that’s going out for submission through the Community Access Fund program that we’re hoping we’ll have positive responses to. I also have to mention that we took the liberty to talk to some of the federal Ministers about the community’s desire to construct a road to a gravel source. So I think we’ve done a lot of work in that area. We’re not mandated to work on gravel sources.

We’re also not mandated to do main street chipsealing as the Member has mentioned. We had historically worked with communities through MACA, who had provided the funding for us to do the application to a number of communities. That money has now been cut off. We don’t have a replacement budget for it. We certainly still have the expertise and we do provide it to the communities that request it. We’d like to continue to offer that and try to move forward. There’s a number of communities that have utilized our department and our staff that have expertise in this area to do some of that work.

We are also quite keen on looking at what other applications are out there for highways in the NWT for dust suppressant or for providing a solid base or protective base such as chipseal or other types of applications. We have, as some people have mentioned here, taken the opportunity to enter into an agreement with a company called Easy Street, to do some testing and experimenting with their product. We are right now using a lot of chipseal in most of the areas. It has a limited life of anywhere from three to seven years. We’d like to go to something that would last longer and we’re trying to find that. We’re also trying to balance it with

something that’s affordable. We feel that maybe Easy Street might be the product. We have tested some on the road towards Dettah and we are also testing some on Highway No. 3. We are hoping this will be a product that we’ll be able to utilize in other areas. We’ve made a commitment to look at doing something on the Dempster, I think it was during the last budget go around, and we’re planning to do that. We want to do analysis, we want to do the study of what the economics of providing chipseal are and what the economics of providing Easy Street are and what would work in that area under those conditions.

We’ve also tried to do a number of things with the Peel River Bridge. The Member has done a lot of work in this area. He has provided some unsolicited proposals or information to us about what other people have estimated it would take to put a bridge in that area. Our studies show that it’s around $60 million. We had agreed that we would look at bringing it forward through the capital process. We haven’t been able to do that. But as we package up our new Highway Strategy update, we will certainly be sure to consider including that.

There’s also been comment about the community access budget now being increased to $1 million. We’re quite happy to see that. It had been at that level for several years historically, but over time budget reductions forced us to reduce the program to around $300,000. A lot of communities like to utilize that fund. I have to voice my appreciation to the Rural and Remote committee that had a lot of discussion and pointed out that this was an important program for communities to use, so we have, at the direction and recommendations from those committees, increased the budget to $1 million and I have also expanded the criteria to include marine and allow the communities to come forward and apply to do other types of projects. If there is a desire, they could also use it on gravel roads.

MLA Beaulieu indicated that he is interested in seeing the Austin Lake project go ahead and we think it’s a good project. We have not seen an application yet for any funding requests. We have had some indications that the community administration, I believe the SAO, is coming to town to discuss some options to move this forward. They also have had interest demonstrated by one of the mines, Diavik, and also the Mine Training Society. I have also had the opportunity to talk to them about how they could be involved. There is a lot of interest in it and it needs to be packaged up and put together.

I’m very happy to hear from MLA Menicoche that he feels we need to work together and get things done. We’re quite happy to include in our budget a Trout Lake airport and the money that we got through Building Canada to do that, because it was an area

that needed investment and we didn’t have the capital to do it. We also agree with him that we are needing to put together a chrono of events. We have some of it drafted already. As we move forward, and I had committed in the House that we would need to compile expenditures or break down expenditures to date. That amount of expenditures on the Deh Cho Bridge is up to $75 million.

We also are looking at doing some of the final work on the Nahanni Butte access. In the next month or so we’re going to see some resurfacing done by a company from Fort Liard. I think the community will be very pleased about that. We also now have the ability to talk to them or at least discuss the possibility of looking at some form of a docking for their requirements.

The Member also raised the concern about the Jean Marie Road not being an all-season. I have to correct him. That road is listed as an all-season road. Of course, it needs some upgrading and it needs a lot of investment, and we certainly agree with that.

Mr. Ramsay indicated that talking about the Deh Cho Bridge is not easy. I certainly would agree with him. Mr. Chairman, it’s always a concern when we have a project that we are negotiating on, it’s been my policy to provide all the information up front to the Members, but when that information starts coming out to the public, it’s really concerning, and also when we have Members using that information to create a negative environment, that we have to still negotiate deals on, it becomes even more challenging. We agree, of course, that the public need to know, but we also need to be able to all act reasonably when we talk about information that’s going to jeopardize some of our negotiations. We hear the feedback. People are not deaf. They hear what we are talking about here. I’m quite happy, you know, that we’ve heard concerns, but it’s difficult for us to relive history and try to explain over and over again why certain things happened the way they did. We made our best judgment in moving forward and, unfortunately, it’s resulted in a number of challenges that we’ve had to make changes in order to keep this project going.

There is a budget shortfall and the Member also indicated why it was not mentioned in my opening comments. Well, it’s not in this budget, Mr. Chairman. There’s no mention of the Deh Cho Bridge. We’re not coming forward for any money under these main estimates. It is in the supp that has not even been tabled yet, so it’s kind of premature to expect us to start talking about the budget needs that are already covered in a different budget. We could talk about the reason for tendering the way we did or not tendering the way we did, and I think we’ve had some of that discussion. I’m not sure if we’re ever going to satisfy the Member regarding that. I know that the

Member has voiced his concern about the Deh Cho Bridge Corporation and the fact that he didn’t like us partnering with them, but I’m of a different opinion. We still agree partnering is important. We still would like to see what we can do with the Deh Cho Bridge Corporation. We have other partnerships. We have a partnership with the City of Yellowknife. I think that’s working well. It has its budget shortfalls, the same percentage amount that the Deh Cho Bridge has. We have partnerships with the federal government. We have partnerships with the communities of Tuk and Inuvik, and we’re working with the community of Aklavik on a partnership-type of arrangement to make submissions. So I still think partners are important if we’re going to do a lot of this work that needs to be done in the Northwest Territories.

Also, with the PDR, as I indicated earlier, I’m quite happy and quite proud that we’re able to secure some dollars to get that done. The voice of the communities was getting very loud and we needed to do something to move that forward. Now we have the ability to move that forward without having to absorb all the costs ourselves as a government.

We are, in response to Mr. Jacobson’s question about Drive Alive, we have a number of initiatives that we are focusing on to include as part of this program.

Of course, I disagree with Mr. Hawkins’ point that I don’t respond to his needs. I try very hard to be accommodating for Mr. Hawkins. He has raised a number of issues. He’s raised the point that he made suggestions for the new driver’s licence. I would have to find that somewhere in Hansard that he made the suggestion. Mr. Chairman, he’s also been quite adamant on the cell phone distracted driving legislation that he feels needs to be brought forward. I have committed to meet with committee. There has been one motion already that was defeated. I need to bring the information that we have compiled forward to committee for their discussion and to see if we can bring it forward. I think if we are serious about having distracted driving legislation, that we can move that forward fairly quickly. We’ve done quite a bit of work in the last while to this area and I need to have that discussion and we have requested, I believe, some time with committee.

On the subject of the Slave Geological Province, this is one of the few projects that can fit under the P3 program or there’s a possibility. We need to do more work on this area. Right now, we’re looking at a study only and we need to do this in order to see if we have a business case.

Mr. Hawkins also raised the issue of the Deh Cho Bridge. I guess a final comment on that is there’s been lots of work done in this area and I can’t change history on the Deh Cho Bridge. But we did make a number of changes. We’ve changed the

contractor. We’ve changed the design. We changed the project management. It’s raised a lot of concern and understandably so, but those things needed to be done. It’s still my position to try to move it forward and get the project done in a timely manner to meet some of the time frames that we’ve set out for ourselves. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Minister McLeod. That concludes the general comments. Does committee agreed?

Moving to detail. We will defer page 11-7, the department summary, Transportation, operations expenditure summary. Does committee agree that we defer?

Page 11-8, information item, transportation, infrastructure investment summary. Questions? Mr. Ramsay.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. On the infrastructure investment strategy, I’m just wondering, given the troubles we’ve had with some partners, you know, and I never have said that we shouldn’t partner with or look for partners where it makes sense. I think if you look at the federal government, the City of Yellowknife, the Municipality of Tuk and some others, I mean, we’ve got some good cases where we’ve gone into partnerships with people who have brought something to the table. Mr. Chairman, I’m wondering if the Department of Transportation has learned anything on the partnership they had with the Deh Cho Bridge Corporation and whether or not they’ve developed any kind of policy or, you know, going forward, a policy on what they would take as far as partners, take on partners, what that would be? Have they got any, I guess, way to gauge how good a partner is before they take them on? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Ramsay. Minister McLeod.

Mr. Chairman, as we move forward and develop partnerships and sign MOUs with different aboriginal governments, different companies and different communities, we continually learn best practices. This is no different from the Deh Cho Bridge. The Deh Cho Bridge is a P3 project that had no policy, as has been mentioned before. It has since been drafted through Finance, I believe, and I’m sure as we take stock upon completion of this project, we will look at where we could have done better and learn from that. Thank you.

Again, I just wanted to state again for the record, I am not opposed to the partnerships and I don’t want the Minister to think that I am opposed. However, I think the department needs to

learn something. This partnership that we got into with the Deh Cho Bridge Corporation, they never had the required equity. They still don’t have the required equity. It’s cost us as a government nothing but headaches and money, Mr. Chairman. Again, we have to be very careful when it comes to getting into partnerships with folks who don’t have the equity and can’t deliver on the project at the end of the day. I just wanted to state that for the record, but I am not opposed to partnerships where they make sense. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Ramsay. I didn’t hear a question there. We’ll move on to Mr. Menicoche.

Thank you very much there, Mr. Chair. I move that we report progress.

I seem to have come up with a tie there. Let’s try that again.

---Defeated

Committee, we’re dealing with detail of the Department of Transportation. We’re on page 11-8, information item, Transportation, infrastructure investment summary. Questions?

Page 11-9, information item, Transportation, revenue summary, Mr. Krutko.

Could the Minister tell me with regard to recoveries, research and development, Building Canada Plan, $264,000, could you give me a breakdown on that? What research is it being spent on?

Thank you, Mr. Krutko. Mr. Neudorf.

It wasn’t clear from the deputy minister. Did you state that this money is a seven-

year fund? Is the research money for seven years or is it based on three years?