Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I feel like I have already said so much about the Deh Cho Bridge. It is probably the single topic that I have spoken to most in this Legislature in my 15 years that I have been an MLA. I don’t know what good it is to rehash everything that has already been brought up by other Members here today except I do feel obligated to my constituents to be on the record in this matter.

I think Mr. Abernethy did an excellent job of summarizing the situation where we find ourselves today.

Mr. Chairman, if we could argue that the bridge over the Mackenzie River is a useful piece of infrastructure that has merit, I guess the thing about the entire process that has been the most offensive to me as a Member of this Legislature, as an elected member, would be sheer inability to get

information in a timely manner that would have normally been involved, if this would have been available, if this process had been a normal capital planning and capital project process. I think that has been the most frustrating. We are trying to do our job as MLAs and to be accountable to the public. This is a piece of public infrastructure. I could go back at the many turns in the road, the many junctures where we tried to get information and the fact that it was the Deh Cho Bridge Corporation that was acting essentially as an agent for this project was the shield or the veil or the barrier that was put up to us that did not allow us that kind of scrutiny that we would normally apply in doing a good job of doing what we do, and that is to be accountable. That is one of the most frustrating things for me.

Would we have voted to spend $165 million of our capital on the Deh Cho Bridge had this not been done through this Deh Cho Bridge Corporation Act, and had this not come about the way that it did would we as a government have put ourselves in the position where we would have wanted to build something like this?

I think my colleague Mr. Beaulieu said that perhaps we wouldn’t have put this much of our capital budget into one project. Perhaps we would have spread it around to more communities, to more different types of projects, because $165 million or $185 million certainly represents a lot of capital infrastructure in a lot of places had we not done this.

But having said that, we are where we are today. We can’t change the past now.

It would be really sad going forward if this bridge turns out to have some structural problem with it. I think that would be the absolute insult on injury in this case, but we are assured by the Department of Transportation officials that every reasonable effort is being made to ensure the quality of the construction of this and that all industry standards are being adhered to.

As someone said, we are not bridge engineers. We are completely lay people when it comes to that kind of expertise. We are heavily relying on the commitment and on the word of the Minister of Transportation and his officials when they tell us that everything is above-board and everything is to the highest standards for quality. Because that would be quite unbearable to the people of the Northwest Territories to not only have a project that perhaps was not our priority and was not our way that we would have spent this money, but to have something that would be defective in some way going forward would be just an absolute shame.

I have absolutely no evidence that there is such a problem, but, as I said, we find ourselves where we are today. As I said in my Member’s statement today, one of the redeeming qualities of this project,

when we build a school or we build a hospital or build other types of infrastructure in the Northwest Territories, there is no way of generating revenue off of those. Those are straight outlay for capital and ongoing O and M. One of the redeeming qualities I suppose, if there are any of this project, is that if the traffic continues and if the tolls are collected, this debt can be paid off in a businesslike way for this piece of infrastructure. That is one thing that does make it unique. I hope the trucks keep rolling. I used to take the position that I didn’t support the bridge, but, well, as long as the people in Yellowknife will pay for it, I guess I could maybe just not lay awake at night and worry about it quite so much.

I always said it wasn’t going to impact the financial standing or situation of the rest of the people of the Northwest Territories, but if the plan going forward goes awry in any way, if there are problems with the bridge, if our projections for total revenues are wrong, I guess it will require everyone’s participation to now be involved in this project.

I suppose at some point in time there would have been a desire on the part of the people of the Northwest Territories to have a bridge over the Mackenzie River at Fort Providence. There are issues of inflation. There are issues of global warming that may have impacted the length of the season when we could have an ice road across the Mackenzie River. There are things that maybe hopefully we will look back on some day and say that it was good to get this piece of infrastructure in place when we did. I hope that’s the case, but I suppose only time will actually tell.

So like my colleagues who have already spoken, I don’t see any other choice but to support this today. I suppose I could say on principle and to be consistent with every position I’ve taken on this bridge, to be consistent I could, I suppose, vote against this. But I don’t think that would be the right thing for me to do. I hope that people out there in the public who might have been expecting me to do that, to really stand up against this, because there is a lot of opposition to this project and the way it’s been handled out there in the public, and maybe there would be an expectation that I would vote against it on a matter of principle and on a matter of sending a statement to this government. But the reality is that the bridge is half built. We’re the guarantors of the loan. The loan has been called. We have no choice but to step up to the plate on this project. But going forward, let’s do everything in our power as a department and as a government to ensure that we bring whatever we can to this to make it a quality project and a viable project from the cost-benefit analysis and the projections that we base this on going back many years.