Thank you, Mr. Speaker. First of all, I want to say I appreciate the Member’s efforts for working towards moving this project forward. I also recognize the Member for Yellowknife Centre for thinking outside of Yellowknife Centre.

Our Government of the Northwest Territories has been working quite hard to move the desire to have the highway done, the Mackenzie Valley moving forward. We certainly have been taking the planning of doing so very seriously and continue to make that a priority for us. We have now moved forward towards doing the project description reports for a number of sections on the highway. There are still a couple of agreements that we are working towards including. This is a very significant step forward to achieve the vision of developing and building a Mackenzie Valley Highway.

I want to say I am very pleased with the cooperation and involvement of all the land claim groups and of all the aboriginal businesses that have taken the time to talk to us along the proposed highway route. Of course, the Bear River is a very important portion or part of the Mackenzie Valley Highway. I don’t think anybody is going to disagree. We certainly support the arguments and the benefits noted in the resolution, and the construction and the operation of a bridge across the Bear River will bring a large variety of benefits to Tulita and other communities in the Sahtu. The construction of the bridge over the Bear River will result in earlier openings, which is always a problem for us, and a later closing of the Mackenzie Valley Winter Road. We recognize this portion of the winter road as a bottleneck and causes problems on an annual basis.

However, we also have to recognize the cost of the Bear River Bridge has been pegged at $60 million at last count and we certainly need Canada’s commitment to provide the necessary resources to build this bridge and also to build this highway. As a department and as Minister, I have personally raised this issue a number of times for funding with the federal government in meetings with Canada. The project was proposed for funding with the Canada Strategic Infrastructure Fund. It was also proposed again under the Building Canada Plan and more recently under the federal stimulus funding. Unfortunately, the significant cost to construct the bridge was a challenge to actually move this project forward.

So the department officials, DOT, will be discussing P3 projects or potential P3 projects as the Bear River Bridge motion moves forward. We will certainly take the opportunity to talk to them. We believe there’s a meeting set up fairly soon in

Yellowknife with those officials and we will be meeting with them as soon as possible. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.