Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’ll be happy to provide some opening comments on the Supplementary Appropriation No. 2 that’s before us. I’m having a great deal of difficulty with supporting this. I’ll say that up front. I have been critical of the project from the very beginning. I mentioned earlier today in my Member’s statement that I just see one bad decision being compounded by another bad decision. For the life of me I cannot understand why we’re not going to complete an audit of the project. That is going through the books of the Deh Cho Bridge Corporation, going through all the records of the engineers, getting a full stock of where we’ve been in an effort to try to move forward.

I’m not interested in going back in time and going over who did what and when, and playing pin the blame on the donkey. I’m not trying to do that. What we have to do is try to move the project forward in a coordinated way. I know the Department of Transportation is committed to doing that. You see the project management team that’s been assembled. It’s a comprehensive one. It’s a good one. It is a good team. But in saying that it’s a good team, why wouldn’t we, when a project is basically stopped midway...and I debated this with the Minister who says it’s 50 percent done, but I don’t quite agree with that. I don’t think it’s close to 50 percent. When a project is stopped mid-stroke you should at the very least find out how you got to where you got to before you enter into any contract and commit any more public dollars to a project like the Deh Cho Bridge Project.

Why we would be in such a rush to get into a sole-sourced negotiated contract with one company, again, for the life of me, I do not understand. I mentioned it earlier and that’s probably why I’m not going to end up supporting this, because on principle I think it has to go through a complete audit. We have to get a handle on where it’s been in order to move it forward. I don’t see it happening and I don’t understand how you can do an audit with one hand and sign a contract with another hand and the new contractor try to carry out the work when there’s all this other stuff hanging in the background. It’s not something I think is a good decision. With all due respect to the Minister and the government, I disagree with them 100 percent that they’re doing the right thing by negotiating a contract with one company on this bridge, given the history.

Given the history we obviously didn’t learn anything through the exercise with ATCON. That was a negotiated sole-sourced contract with ATCON as well; supposedly a fixed-price contract. It never ended up being that way and even the numbers are moving around as we speak. The numbers we talked about, and the Minister knows what those numbers are, when he came before us, there’s a difference between what we were told was going to

be signed with Ruskin and what was actually signed with Ruskin. There’s a bit of a difference there. And that all happened in the past couple of weeks. What work is that for? Is that for work that we have already supposedly paid for? I think it’s for the approaches or the abutments.

Again, things are just changing. For me what this exercise is going to be about is trying to get some things lined up and try to get a chronology of events of when things were said, when things happened, and try to make some sense of it. Right now I’m at a bit of a loss as to why some things are said when they’re said and why other things are left out or omitted when I believe the government knew full well what was going on and didn’t divulge that to Regular Members.

Now, interestingly, I had some questions for the Minister of Transportation earlier about the lenders and the more I think about it, when the lenders gave the Government of the Northwest Territories, through the Deh Cho Bridge Corporation, access to that construction account to the tune of about $75 million, they did so because they were interested in seeing the project move forward, like us. It was a good relationship. That relationship soured at some point in time. The lenders got so that they locked that construction account up in December of last year. No money was flowing out of that construction account. When they write letters -- I’m not sure who the letter went to, the Minister of Transportation, the Premier, or the Finance Minister – to our government, you can rest assured that somewhere in those letters it just doesn’t say N-O, you’re not getting any more money. It should specify exactly the reasons why the lenders do not want to proceed with lending money out of that construction account. I would like to at some point in time see the letters that we got back from the lenders and see exactly what they say. I think those letters would probably paint a pretty good picture of why the lenders were getting scared. Did the government act when they should have acted? Did they wait?

Here we are, it’s almost April and the big reason why the government didn’t want to go to tender on the second half of this project was all about timing. They always said it would set the project back a year. I don’t buy that it’s going to set the project back a year. I think if we had gone to tender -- and Ruskin could have rightfully bid on that contract and won the contract, who knows what would have happened -- at the end of the day I could rest assured and tell my constituents that we managed the public purse the best way that we could, we went to tender, we got the best price, we had a design that was finished and we got the work done. That’s what I want to be able to tell my constituents. I can’t tell my constituents that because I know that’s not the way things happened. We negotiated a sole-sourced contract with one company. And

that number is moving. It’s a moving target. Why is it a moving target? Because I do still believe today that there are things in that design that are unfinished and are going to cost us more money as we move this project forward. I hope I’m wrong on that, I really do, but I really don’t believe that I’m going to be wrong.

I also don’t believe that the bridge is going to be constructed by November 2011. I really do not believe that. And I do not believe for one second that this bridge is going to cost the government and the taxpayers in the Northwest Territories $181 million. It is going to cost more than that. You can mark my words that it is going to cost more than that. I hope I’m wrong, but it is going to cost more than that.

There are other issues at play that I’m going to address and questions as we move forward. I want to give other Members a chance to provide some opening comments. I want to know quite specifically when the government signed a notice to award the contract to Ruskin or when the Deh Cho Bridge Corporation signed that contract, when they signed the intent to award, when they signed the notice to proceed. I want to know who signed it.

I want to know what legality the Government of the Northwest Territories has on that contract that the Deh Cho Bridge Corporation signed with Ruskin. Where do we fit in all this? I think that’s an important aspect as well. I also want to know if it’s not too late to get out, to stop what we’re doing and take stock of where we’ve been and where we need to go, and get the best price that we can. Go to the marketplace for the second half and move on. That’s what people want to see us doing. They don’t want to just see us giving out sole-sourced contracts to the closest guy there. That’s what we’re doing. It doesn’t make much sense. The only argument I can see is the fact that we might have to pay some interest, but nobody’s proven to me that going to the marketplace is going to save us $15 million or $16 million. We have to pay $8 million if it’s going to go past November 2011. That’s going to be a big issue. It’s going to go past November 2011 guaranteed. I almost guarantee you that. It’s not going to be finished by then.

I’ll have a lot of questions here and I look forward to asking them and trying to get some answers.