Thanks again for those comments. Yet another cost to climate change, and I hope the department is adding that as obviously an environmental cost and not just a financial cost.
I suppose my most major comment is that it’s clear that our highway systems are deteriorating, partly as the cost of climate change and new problems raise their ugly heads. Unfortunately, we are choosing to take on new, very expensive, and even more daunting environmentally, projects, and let our existing infrastructure deteriorate. That’s my major concern. I know the Minister is aware of that.
I just want to throw in one example here and that’s the Detah road. There are many examples: Highway No. 7 and so on. But the Detah road, here we have a project that’s been abandoned in midstream. It’s a very modest project. The residents have been calling for work on this. It wasn’t even really a road. A Caterpillar just threw a bunch of gravel on top of the trees there for a long time. The residents there have been extremely disappointed and, really, aghast that there have not been funds dedicated to that project and that, in fact, it’s being abandoned in midstream like this.
I know the Minister, again, is well aware of this. The work that’s been done there has been done incidentally on the backs of other projects that haven’t been done or whatever, and it’s an incidental approach. I think we have a much greater responsibility to the residents of Detah, as we do to all communities. What is the Minister going to do to correct that situation? I don’t see it in this plan. That’s unacceptable to me, again, when we are throwing tens of millions of dollars this fiscal year, and so on, at new projects.