Thank you, Madam Chair. Just in terms of the Building Canada Plan, in 2013-2014 our capital plan still has three specific projects that have BCP capital funding: the Highway No. 4 reconstruction; the Highway No. 1, 187 to 411; and the Highway No. 8 reconstruction. Three capital projects that would have been approved in the fall capital plan.
Then we also have about $250,000 that would be for BCP R and D that would be allocated next year. In terms of the regulatory changes and the impact, the place that it’s being felt the most is in our airports division where we need to operate our airports in accordance with Transport Canada regulations. There have been a few changes over the last three or five years or so that we’ve been implementing. By far the biggest one would be the implementation of safety management systems. We’re actually in year four of four, so we are nearing the end and getting all of our documents and procedures in place.
We have come forward with two forced-growth items for that in the past. One in the past where we got some extra positions and funding to meet the various requirements there, then there’s forced growth as part of the budget here that brings three additional positions into DOT, one in Inuvik Airport, one in Fort Simpson Airport, both to have help with
the operations, and meet the extra requirements for reporting and conducting emergency exercises and wildlife management plans, and then another in Yellowknife here to deal with the extra technical documentation required as part of safety management systems.
The other two areas that have seen significant changes is, first, on emergency response planning where we now have to go into communities that are with certified airports on a regular basis, once a year, and conduct a live exercise and do planning for that. It takes a considerable amount of planning to conduct those exercises, particularly in our smaller communities. It is, of course, a benefit to do that, a benefit for DOT to potentially deal with an emergency in an airport, but also a benefit to communities because they can learn the process to go through an emergency exercise and how to deal with those. We do work closely with the RCMP, with Health, and with MACA in planning those.
In terms of other regulatory changes, I think the federal government changes with Bill C-38 and Bill C-45, the Navigable Waters Act and the Fisheries Act, where, from a DOT perspective, we think that they do go a long way to simplify the rules to make them clearer and to make our job and the requirements to meet those various regulatory requirements much more straightforward to fulfill.