Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just to follow up on the Finance Minister’s comments and to Mrs. Groenewegen, I do appreciate her support. Looking at, I know some Members like to draw a comparison to the Deh Cho Bridge and I think the comparison is not something we can draw. I don’t think there are a lot of comparisons between the Deh Cho Bridge and the Tuk-Inuvik highway. On the Deh Cho Bridge it was always the federal government was going to come
to the table and that was the premise for the Deh Cho Bridge all along. At the end of the day the federal government didn’t come to the table. In the Tuk-Inuvik highway we have the best possible partner we could get as a government. We have the federal government committing $150 million and they want to be our partner in building this vital piece of infrastructure in our territory. Like I said, we couldn’t ask for a better partner.
If you look at the infrastructure and the level of investment in this territory in the past five years through programs like Building Canada and CSIF, it was an unprecedented amount of federal dollars that flowed into this territory to build vital infrastructure across the territory. What better partner to have on a project than the federal government? We’re fortunate enough, I believe, to have that commitment by the federal government of $150 million to pursue the Tuk-Inuvik highway. I think there’s little comparison that can be drawn with the Deh Cho Bridge and I just wanted to put that out there.
On the other issues that Mrs. Groenewegen had on maintenance, we’ve done some early estimates and it was brought up at committee as well. It’s approximately $2 million a year. It’s based on maintenance costs on the Dempster Highway on a comparable distance of highway. Again, these things have to be vetted and they’ll be vetted through that geotechnical and environmental work that needs to be done.
I again think it’s early days but there’s little comparison that can be made to the Deh Cho Bridge aside from the magnitude of the investment in infrastructure in this territory. That’s the only comparison that you can make.