Thank you, Madam Chair. My question is once again in regard to the access to some of our surrounding communities in the Beaufort-Delta region.
As most of you are aware, a lot of our schools were shut down and even some of our communities were shut down during a big blizzard that we had just most recently. Just wondering if there was any special assistance outside of the ice roads and the transportation to the communities, which do rely I wouldn’t say heavily, but do rely on some of the services that are provided by Inuvik. When our contractors run over their budget, if there’s some kind of special budget that is put in place for not only the contractors on the highways and the ice roads but even for our municipal contractors when a town gets shut down because of high snowdrifts. That does cause emergency situations where if somebody needs to go to the hospital of if there is an RCMP emergency, something’s going on that does need to be addressed, and when we have high snowdrifts and lack of ground transportation to get to these communities or even into some of the places in our community, how those are addressed. Last year we had a blizzard that was very similar that pretty well shut down the whole community. This time it lasted for a whole week rather than just a couple of days.
Looking into that and looking at our patterns for the last few years, if you can call it a pattern, this is something that we might be looking at again in the future, and we want to see if we can address this in the budget for next year, even to the end of this fiscal year, making sure that there is money available should something like this happen again. We don’t want to be stuck in the cold when our contractors and our departments have no further
money to reach some of the people in the communities or even get services to them.
Even on the ice roads there was some single-lane traffic, which does become very dangerous, especially with some of the big trucks that are commuting on the highways there. Just a comment on what we’ve seen up in the Beaufort-Delta the last couple of years and making sure that we do have access to our surrounding communities, specifically Aklavik, Tuktoyaktuk, Tsiigehtchic and Fort McPherson. Thank you, Madam Chair.