Thank you, Madam Chair. What I have learned is, when I’m given two figures, a high one and a low one, especially as Finance Minister, I tend to immediately focus on the high number, knowing that in my experience the low number never tends to be the one where the project ends up.

Undoubtedly the reason this Minister is such a great Finance Minister. The federal government has committed 60 percent of the project, 67 percent, $200 million. Obviously that’s not full cost. In fact, the federal government has said explicitly that anything beyond this must fully be paid for by GNWT. Am I correct in assuming that if we are $40 million or $50 million or $100 million over, that would be fully the responsibility of the GNWT?

The $200 million contribution by the federal government is their final contribution to this project. It will be up to us to manage the project successfully with our investment to hit the $299 million.

We know that the Minister of Transportation has said this project would not proceed if there was anything less than 75 percent. Where does that put us?

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Mr. Ramsay.

Thank you, Madam Chair. The fact is that we have the additional $50 million which puts their contribution to $200 million. It isn’t quite 75 percent as we had expected. It’s 67

percent. At the end of the day, the Members of this House will decide whether or not the project is to proceed. That is where that is at.

I suspect we can conclude a little more than that, but I’ll leave it at that. I would say, also, that clearly is not 67 percent. It’s $200 million. In fact, as the costs go up, the proportion paid for by the Government of Canada goes down, despite the fact that the Minister indicated that the project would not proceed unless it was 75 percent. That’s an observation, but a concerning one. Is there not a policy, could I ask the Minister of Finance, that we’ve generally adhered to in the past where the Government of Canada in fact pays for the road building and GNWT pays and looks after maintenance of them?

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Mr. Miltenberger.

Thank you, Madam Chair. There is no policy. In the days of yore when the federal government was the major player on the scene, of course they had much greater responsibility. There is no formal policy that dictates the federal government has some type of responsibility to cover 100 percent of new roads.

Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. I haven’t heard that saying in a while, in the days of yore. Mr. Bromley.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I believe that’s true. It was a policy in the days of yore. It certainly is not any longer. What concerns me is, as time goes by, the proportion being paid for by the federal government declines steadily. Of course, this is all within context. I’m not just complaining about the cost of the road or anything. This is within the context of the other priorities that we have and the infrastructure deficit that we’re building as we choose to pour it all into this one project.

The Minister has noted that he thinks we can afford this. We are making decisions for the 17th Assembly. Unfortunately, we are also making decisions for the 18th Assembly here, just as the

16th Assembly pushed us into increased debt, albeit

with a little bit of a raised debt limit for the 17th Assembly. This is an uncomfortable trend to see. I again just don’t generally support that approach of this Minister of Finance who has been common to the two.

I just want to comment, too, on the geotech work. I understand it is to focus on the cost of the bridges as well as the proving up, hopefully once and for all, the gravel resources. How many bridges and water crossings are we talking about?

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Minister Miltenberger.

First let me just make a quick comment, if I may, in response to the comments about the fiscal and financial health of the Government of the Northwest Territories.

We’re one of the best run jurisdictions in the country, top three. We have an Aa1 credit rating. We have one of the best debt-to-GDP ratios, revenue-to-interest ratios in the country. We are pushing ourselves fiscally because we have a lot of things to do as a territory and we’re not prepared to sit back and be overly cautious. We’re careful and prudent, but we know we have to do things. As a government, we are managing ourselves, which is why we have an $800 million borrowing limit. We have an annual GDP of over $4 billion a year, almost $5 billion.

For the Member to say that we’re not well managed financially by this Legislature and by the government is inaccurate, and I will assume that his comment about what a good Finance Minister I was previously was, the sincerity metre didn’t register very highly. So I won’t take that as something that I’d feel all warm and fuzzy about. I’ll ask Mr. Neudorf if he would speak specifically to the number of bridges and crossings.

Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. Mr. Neudorf.

Thank you, Mr. Neudorf. Mr. Bromley.

Obviously, for a project of this magnitude, significant work has to be done there. Just in response to the Minister’s response, I didn’t say it was bad. I said the trend of increasing debt is not something I’m happy with. The decisions that are being made that end up with that result.

I’d like to comment a little bit on the dreams, you know, that we want to be doing things. In fact, that’s probably the biggest source of my concerns, is that I am totally convinced we could be doing things, and I’m totally convinced we have the capacity within our people and the resources to do them. I’m wondering, what have we looked at in terms of real economic development, development to develop the economy in this region, which I’d dearly love to see, that generates lasting jobs rather than, according to the government, 42 long-term jobs over 45 years and the loss of thousands of person years in relation to oil and gas development. What

work have we done to actually develop the economy in these regions? This area, which is a fantastic area in terms of its people – it’s spectacular – its potential in many ways. What have we done to shift away from these large, costly megaprojects and actually do things that really do help the people and provide the long-term, sort of, economic development that we’d like to see?

Thank you, Mr. Bromley. Now we are really straying even from talking specifically about this highway. I’ll let the Minister respond, though.

Madam Chair, once again, the debate by Members that live in the regions where they have just about all their infrastructure needs met and asking people in the northern part of the territory and the Beaufort-Delta, why do you need a road, it’s a sinkhole, it’s not worth investing up there. That, as Northerners, somehow we do not consider you worthy putting in things that we take for granted, the road, the bridge, the Ingraham Trail, the bypass road. That type of infrastructure which we take for granted here somehow becomes a megaproject that’s not economically viable in the northern part of the Territories. It is something I can’t get my mind around to accept as a valid issue.

We are going to spend about $60 million to $80 million. Let’s talk about the fibre optic line. It’s going to make Inuvik one of two places in the world that’s going to do remote sensing, that we know in Kiruna, Sweden, it’s built up an industry in Kiruna worth about $100 million to $150 million a year. We are working on a joint venture structure with the Aboriginal governments. That project is underway and will be well along construction in the life of this Assembly. We’re going to continue to do all the other work that we do supporting local business. We will see what happens with the resource sector. There are plenty of other opportunities in the region but they need infrastructure, which gets us back to roads.

Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. Next I have Mr. Dolynny.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Again, since we’ve opened up this debate beyond the $5 million, I’m going to spearhead my conversation on that premise as well.

I’ve got to give a lot of credit to IRC and the people of Beaufort-Delta for putting on a very good program bringing this project to light. They were very well organized, and I believe that they deserve a lot of credit for bringing it forward. Where I find a problem is I don’t think our government was in line with the project. By that I mean the fact that we’ve asked and always asked from a Minister, whether it’s the Minister of Finance, the Minister of Transportation, to be totally upfront about this

project right from the get-go. Show us the numbers. Show us the math. Show us the risk. Not only us, but show the public that information, as well, so that we can make an informed decision when the time comes.

I’m going to read you a passage very quickly here from March 5, 2013, from Minister Ramsay, and it says: “It is this Assembly that is going to ultimately make the decision on whether the project moves forward or not. All this information is going to be made available to both Members and the public.”

Members have received information, but what made it very difficult was we were hampered, we were put on gag order that we couldn’t share this information, not even on the floor of the House. We couldn’t even go outside the floor of the House to talk about this project, and it’s a great project. As I said, a lot of hard work has gone on behind the scenes and I pass a lot of credit for all the people behind the scenes in making this happen.

It comes down to a couple of areas, and we talked a bit about the math that we had before us. Again, depending how you look at it, if my calculations are accurate, we’re on the hook for $99 million, but we’ve already put $12 million, so we’re in it for $111 million. If you put that in the premise of the big picture, that’s 35.7 percent, and the feds are in it for 64.3 percent. Those are hard numbers. We can dispute it as much as we want, but we’re not at 75/25, that’s for sure. And you know what? That’s the numbers. I can go forward with that, as long as we know that there are numbers out there and that the public hears those numbers.

The other part of this exercise is the fact that the public has not seen the risk of this project, and I want to take a minute here to talk about that. I brought this up in the Committee of the Whole deliberation last week, and I told the Minister of Transportation of the day, if I had to pull up, and I did pull up in front of him the Department of Transportation website. The last information that was given to the public that was published on their website was May of 2011. That’s 22 months old. Since that time, since last week the Department of Transportation added the EIRB final report, which it says January 2013, but that was just added there. The public has not seen anything for 22 months.

Now, there may have been discussion in here, and there have been reports in the media, but this is the Department of Transportation telling the public what’s going on in this project, and I scathed the department and the government here for not sharing when they could have been sharing all along. Now we’re faced with a dilemma of having to authorize $5 million, and on top of that, I’m sure we’re going to be talking some other contributions of a significant capacity later on today, and the public still does not know the risk.

My first questions are about the risk. Can the department indicate to me what are the major risks? Again, in terms of categories of risk, I’ve talked about a risk matrix. I can’t talk about a document that’s not tabled. What I’m going to talk about is the document that I have in front of me here, which makes it very difficult, but I’m going to do that. There are risks to this project, and I think people need to know what those risks are. My question to the Minister here is: How many of those are considered very high risks? How many high risks do we have in this project? Of the total risks that were assigned to this project, how many are of very high risk?

Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. Minister Miltenberger.

Thank you, Madam Chair. First, if I may, before I turn it over to Mr. Neudorf, the EIRB website contains all the information that the Member said was lacking from the Transportation website. The Transportation website had a link to the EIRB. We made a commitment to providing a plain language summary of the risk matrix. We’ve done that. We were asked a couple of hours ago. We’ve had staff working hard to get that done. That will be tabled tomorrow. The committee has it before them in committee so we could have this fulsome discussion. In regard to the amount of high risk issues, I’ll ask Mr. Neudorf to respond.

Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. Mr. Neudorf.