Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Again I must preface my statement with all due respect to the folks of the Beaufort-Delta. We, as keepers of the public purse, have a job here to
keep the public interest, and the accountability and transparency for the expenditure of government funds. We have an obligation to question that.
I’d like to also talk about the Inuvik-Tuk highway. I am not categorically dismissing it as a good idea, but there are certainly some very big questions that need to be asked before I can personally endorse a project of this magnitude.
The cost-benefit analysis of a piece of infrastructure of this expense at this time in this area needs to be very critically looked at, and I do hear the plight of the Inuvik area, the Inuvik region, in terms of the economic downtown, the conditions there. I do not think that a $300 million road project to create economy is the answer to that situation, not in and of itself.
I hear the federal government say that they want to be able to say that they have highway infrastructure coast to coast to coast. That’s a very lofty goal, an admirable goal, but our government is necessarily being called upon to participate in this project at least with 25 percent of the capital cost and who knows how much on the ongoing operations and maintenance of that highway.
We have Highway No. 7. We hear our colleague from Nahendeh stand up session after session and talk about the lack of maintenance and upkeep on a highway in his region. We heard many times from folks that represent the Mackenzie Delta about the conditions of the Dempster Highway and how this government does not have enough resources to maintain and upkeep that highway, and now we want to build another piece of highway infrastructure. We need to do so by first very seriously counting the costs of what the use will be and what the ongoing costs of that are.
I look at the latest major highway project this government overtook, which was from the Rae turnoff to Yellowknife, and no offense to the Department of Transportation, but they were building a highway in the Canadian Shield where they had unlimited access to rock they could crush to put a proper bed in that road, and that road is beyond disgusting. I think they started rebuilding the road the day after they built it. That was a $200 million project in this part of the country where they didn’t have to deal with permafrost and all the challenges that they will have to deal with up in the Beaufort-Delta area.
So we have to ask ourselves some very hard questions, regardless of the fact that it is on sale at 75 percent off. It will still be a piece of infrastructure that we will be responsible for and we have to look at this very critically. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.