Thank you, Madam Chair. I appreciate the Member’s comments. Just if I could speak to some of the major points he’s made.

The federal government, Ottawa, sees the Tuk-Inuvik highway as a first step to the completion of the Mackenzie Highway. That’s very clear to us. The timing piece is important. Since we’ve been elected and we’ve had this discussion, we were elected in October and we picked a government in the middle of October, we had a capital session in December. We were also in significant discussions with the federal government about the borrowing limit and our ability to in fact engage in any kind of investment in infrastructure at all, including this project. We were not in a position at that point to say anything definitively because we had not advanced those discussions to the point where we as a government were confident that we had the commitment of the federal government to work with us and recognize our need for a borrowing limit increase.

Since December we had that discussion and we’ve had the meetings. The Premier met with the Prime Minister. I’ve been in discussions with Minister Flaherty. We do have that comfort. We do have it verbally and in writing. So we made the decision at that point that we could move on this. We don’t want to miss a year. The first available time to come back to this Assembly is where we are right now. We scheduled meetings with the committees prior to this to let them know what was happening to do the technical briefings and all the reviews. We, within a fairly compressed timeframe of this new government, have made, I believe, all the right steps to keep everybody fully engaged.

We need to do this work. We need to have a Class C or B estimate so that we can have a clear number collectively that we can look at and make a decision on how much it’s going to cost. As Mr. Ramsay indicated, we also at that point will have a discussion with the federal government based on that number and to see what the split is going to be. Those are all critical pieces. We have made every effort to do this. We, I believe, have made a strong case. We don’t want to lose a year. We have 1,300 days left. This project, in order for us to make an informed decision we need that work. The final decision will come before the House. It’s not going to be Cabinet sitting upstairs in the office just signing a deal. We’re going to have to be able to make the case to this Assembly and to the public and to the people that we’re going to spend X amount of public dollars and we’re going to spend it on this project, and this is how we’re going to manage it, and this is how we’re going to be able to finance it, and this is our portion and this is what the federal portion is going to be. We have to be able to make that case to the people but we can’t do that until we do this work.

Once again, Madam Chair, I’ll ask the Minister, who is much more intimately involved in this process, if he’d like to make any further comments.