Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Obviously, this is not happy news for any of us to have to ante up with $15 million that is GNWT money that could be spent on something else. I was never a supporter of the bridge. I just didn’t think we needed it. Other people thought it was a really high priority and thought it was really important to push it forward regardless of the cost
going up, regardless of the cost benefit analysis not being very favourable. There were people who thought that it was important to push this ahead.
Back in the 14th Assembly, when we passed the
Deh Cho Bridge legislation, I mean, everything seemed all kind of motherhood and sweet and, you know, I mean, who could say that we wouldn’t want bridge infrastructure, who could say that we wouldn’t want to have a bridge over the Mackenzie River at Fort Providence? I mean, that’s the problem, sometimes these things seem like a really good idea at the start, but when it gets closer to the time when we actually have to get involved in the working out of everything, it sometimes can take a turn.
The other thing that was really hard to say no to was the fact that it was self-financing. So it seemed kind of innocuous in terms of our government’s exposure at the time. We were told that the tolls would pay for the bridge. It made a lot of sense, actually, but I still didn’t think that it was… I didn’t have any great fears in the beginning about the kind of stuff we’re facing right now, but as time went on the thing got really changed a lot.
So here we are today. We’re looking at voting GNWT money into this. I would like the people who are owed money and who have done work in good faith on the bridge, I would like them to get paid. In that sense, I think that this goes some ways toward our government doing the honourable thing in terms of respecting those people who have done work and who would be financially very negatively impacted by not getting paid for the work that they’ve done.
I don’t know about the going to tender part. It seems that that would be a good thing if it could save something like $15 million and we weren’t having to come to the table with this. However, I’m not sure what all is involved in that and what kind of documents would have to be in order in order to do that.
Mr. Chairman, well, we could spend a whole lot of time here talking about what we could have, should have, would have, but I’m not really sure that that’s a worthwhile exercise at this juncture either.
The public/private partnership of this aspect has made it a very different type of capital project and creature than what we are used to dealing with as public governments managing capital infrastructure budgets and capital projects. This has made it a very, very different process. It’s not one we’re familiar with and it has caused some concern. I’m still hopeful that someday I hope that my grandchildren will be driving over that bridge going I’m really glad they built this back in 2010 when the cost was only $200 million instead of today when it would have been $400 million. I don’t know. I mean, everybody says why didn’t we build it 30 years ago when we were talking about it and it only would
have been $15 million. So I don’t know what inflation is going to do. I don’t know what’s going to happen. Hopefully somebody will look back on us and say this was a good idea, because it doesn’t feel like it right now.
I think it is an opportune time if the government is going to become more involved to examine this, even if it’s in the sense of, kind of a post-mortem of where we’ve been so far, I think it would be really good to examine this and see how we would have done things differently if we could have. But I think we do need to get on with finishing this project. My time is up already?
That’s okay, Mr. Chairman. That’s all I had to say for now. Thank you.