Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have just a few opening comments on the Department of Transportation. I guess I just want to start off by saying this whole thing with the Deh Cho Bridge, Mr. Minister, is not something that is easy for us to be talking about, easy for myself to be talking about. I have the utmost respect for the Minister and the department. However, we are in this situation. I would expect if the Minister or any of his Cabinet colleagues were on this side of the House and the project was in the status that it’s in, I would expect them to be asking the exact same questions

I am asking. It is with all due respect that I ask these questions. There are no ulterior motives or hidden motives on my part in asking questions that I think the public wants to hear and wants to find out exactly I think why we even signed up for the bridge in the first place. A concession agreement was signed. Again, I think I will never fully understand why the previous government signed that concession agreement. I think that is where all our troubles flow from. If we can go back in time and have a sober second opinion or thought, I would see us not signing that and getting everything in order before we proceeded into a project where, by the looks of things, we really are struggling with it right now. I want to assure the Minister and his staff that it is my intention, Mr. Chairman, to work with everybody in this House to try to find solutions to the problems that we are facing and to try to get this project built and finished in the budget that the Minister is proposing now. That should be our goal.

I want to let the Minister and his officials know that is my goal to try to do that. The accountability, the responsibility, those are things that, as a Member of the Legislative Assembly and a duly elected Member, the public oftentimes calls on us to hold people to account. That is why we are here. It is never a real easy thing, Mr. Chairman, trying to hold your colleagues to account. We all become friends in here. It is a difficult task, Mr. Chairman, but I am going to keep trying to ask the questions.

Again, I’m not happy that the second half of that project didn’t go out to tender. I know I had some discussions with a number of people on that. Again, that is probably something that I might not ever understand when we go to the market place. There are companies that were looking to provide the government and the Deh Cho Bridge Corporation numbers on completion of the superstructure and they were never given a chance to provide those numbers, Mr. Chairman. That, to me, is a travesty. I think the government has never really laid out for Members what the holdup to that happening was.

Again, maybe there are reasons. Maybe the government should put those reasons on the table so Regular Members can see what those reasons are and maybe we will buy into the reasoning and the rationale behind it. The one thing I can buy is the timing and the fact that it is going to cost us money and interest. I can buy that, but judging by when ATCON was let go and the March 1st date, I

think there was enough time, Mr. Chairman, to go into the market place and get a price on that superstructure.

It was interesting, too. I don’t think I heard the Minister talk about the bridge in his opening comments or I didn’t see that in there. So that was an omission that I don’t know if it was done on purpose or if that was meant to happen or what, but

it is something, at the end of the day, we are spending -- the argument is out there -- $182 to $200 million, somewhere in there on a piece of infrastructure and I think, at the end of the day, we are going to have a bridge across that river. It is a process that has allowed us to get there that is troublesome and hopefully along the line we will learn some lessons and how not to get into partnerships with folks who really don’t have the expertise or the equity necessary to deliver on what the stated intended purpose is. That was the case here.

Members know I have had concerns about that from the word go. It has reached a point now, Mr. Chairman, I don’t know what else I can say aside from the fact that I do want to see that bridge get built. I am going to support the Minister in all of his efforts to try to get that done the best way possible.

With that, again, I wanted to thank the Minister and, again, I know I’ve thanked them in the past, but I want to thank the department for their role in the Building Canada Fund and working with the federal government and the City of Yellowknife on finally getting the bypass road into Kam Lake Industrial Park. I may have some questions for the Minister as we go through the detail, Mr. Chairman, but again, I want to thank him for that. Thank you.