Madam Chair, the Minister and I have some little thing going there. The Minister talked about a remote medical rescue initiative interdepartmental working group, and they’re putting in training and looking at piloting a couple of projects. I would hope that now that the winter
roads are closing, there are another 25 or so more days that it will be open. I know the oil companies are going to use that opportunity to get their equipment out, and people are going to come back on the winter road from holidays and people are steadily using that road. Is it something that I could look for to, say, in the early summer or late fall that we can have a well-designed medical rescue response action plan even for the Sahtu for the next winter that we could take and start training or start notifying people that we have something in place?
Next year if the oil and gas exploration continues, and just sitting down with Conoco yesterday, they are very encouraged – the words they used – to continue working in the Sahtu. They smiled with the word encouraging, also with Husky. We are going to look at something that’s more stable, hopefully, in the future, because companies are spending millions and millions of dollars in our region. They go right past all of our small communities along the Mackenzie Valley Highway. Those big trucks are coming up from the Alberta border. There are 1,500 or 1,600 of them right now, and you’re going to see more next year. They come up to the Sahtu. We want to get ready and get prepared.
I encourage the Minister to work with his officials and put a plan in place so that we in the Sahtu can feel supportive and feel some safety that this government here is looking after our roads and that we have a place that we could call ours. We know people in our communities would respond. We have been very lucky, knock on wood, cross our fingers, that no serious accidents have happened. We wouldn’t want to talk about it.
This is very important to our people in the Sahtu. I have to work with the Minister on the other areas of transportation, but this one here is key for us. We can work with the oil companies. They have medics out there. There are a lot of ways.
Anyhow, I am encouraged by what the Minister is saying. I would be really happy if I can see some plan and dollars spent so that we have a medical response team on the Mackenzie Valley winter roads. Thank you.