Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I wasn’t going to get into a history lesson here but perhaps just to go back a little bit, if we look back, and it’s hard… I know the Minister of Transportation said the blame has to be shared around a number of people on this, and if I can just call it like I see it, there are two guys sitting at the table here, both were Members of the previous Cabinet, and if you want to get a little bit of a history lesson, you know, the Finance Minister, former Finance Minister, the Chair of the FMB, and the Minister who would have approved the concession agreement in the dying days of the last government is sitting right here. That’s a bit of a history lesson for you.

This is a serious situation that we’ve gotten ourselves into, and the Premier and the Minister of Transportation, they can spin things however they want to spin them, especially when it comes to the potential of this project to negatively impact the Territory’s finances on a go forward basis. The reason why it’s possible, I believe, for them to say that it’s not going to impact the fiscal strategy is because this supplementary appropriation hasn’t been passed. Absolutely, this expenditure, if it is on our books -- and Mr. Krutko is right, we haven’t gotten anything in writing from anybody -- if this expenditure ends up on the books of the Government of the Northwest Territories it is going to impact our ability to borrow money, it’s going to impact our ability to spend money. And let’s be frank and honest with the residents in the Northwest Territories, those people living in every community across the Territory that are going to be looking for infrastructure spending in their communities, if this thing continues to tilt sideways like it has, our ability as a government to deliver for our residents is going to be negatively impacted.

I’m not ready, maybe some of my colleagues might be ready to drink that Kool-Aid that’s out there, but I’m not willing to drink that Kool-Aid. I would equate it, Mr. Chairman, to something like a credit card and we’ve got ourselves up against our credit limit. We might be able to get a bit of a reprieve from the federal government, Mr. Chairman, but that $165 million is going to have to be repaid at some point

in time. There’s no mistaking that. There’s no getting around that. Certainly, the project is going to generate some revenue, so I guess that is one good aspect to it, but we are going to be on the hook for this, and there are some reasons here that, again, I just can’t see myself…

The right thing to do is to see this project through to conclusion, and I want to see that happen. However, there are some things here, Mr. Chairman, that, in my view, just need to be thoroughly addressed, and they haven’t been addressed.

The first question I’d have, and I guess I would direct it to the Minister of Transportation, is the concerns are out there over the concrete work on the south piers. If we want to get into specifics, I can get into specifics on which pier, how many loads were sent back. I can get into the core samples that were taken and, again, I’ve got a number of pictures, Mr. Chairman, that I do intend on tabling in this House either tomorrow, on Wednesday, that clearly show, and I’m not an engineer, but they clearly show cracks, thermal cracks on a number of the south piers, they show scour rock that is nowhere near the diameter that it was supposed to be for and it’s not even granite, it’s limestone. Most of that scour rock that was put in to protect the piers on the south side of that river has probably flowed away with the current by now. So what protection is there under the water for those piers today? I think that’s a question that needs to be thoroughly analyzed and looked at before, like I said earlier, Mr. Chairman, we approve additional money for this project and we build on top of the already in-the-ground infrastructure there. We need to make sure that that infrastructure is sound and it’s going to meet testing that should be… I think we should get a third party in there to have a look at the concrete work on the south piers.

Also, Mr. Chairman, there are issues with some other things on that, but I guess I have to ask questions here so I will ask that question to the, I guess, the first one would be to the concrete work on the south piers. What can the Minister provide to Members to give us every assurance that that concrete is sound and would pass quality assurance tests if a third party went in there and had a look at it? Thank you, Mr. Chairman.