Thank you, Mr. Chair. My questions to Minister Ramsay are on the planning of the infrastructure of the Mackenzie Valley winter road. It is in regard to the amount of traffic that could be there this coming winter. With the amount that we’ve seen or heard of last year, 2,200 trucks coming up from Wrigley to Tulita and then up to Norman Wells and across to the oilfields, I want to state that I was somewhat disappointed when I read the capital infrastructure and didn’t see any type of infrastructure to protect the people and the safety. There’s going to be a lot of trucks on that road and some of them will be carrying some pretty dangerous chemicals, hauling in and hauling out. The Minister has experienced this and I appreciate the Minister for coming with me last year on the winter road from Fort Good Hope to Fort Simpson. He got a firsthand account of the style of road that we have and the continuous improvement that we do need here. I don’t think we’re quite up to the standards that we want to have for safety.
We were in North Dakota and we did see some pictures of their paved roads where there were grooves in their paved roads because of the amount of trucks that were passing through the county there, and that’s no different than the ice paving project that we have on the winter roads where the grooves are pretty well dug into the road there.
So I want to see if the Minister would look again to see if there is any type of funding that would help with some of the road infrastructure as to clearing out some spots, lining up some of the areas that we need to work on. I know there is some bridge work going on there. That was given last year. We certainly appreciate that, but we need some more in regard to some of the areas that are quite tricky to maneuver around some of these spots.
I ask the Minister, other than what he told me earlier on today in regard to safety, we need to put some money into those roads. Again, I’m not quite convinced that because the development is happening in the Sahtu, the Minister mentioned the amount of $90 million and we’re not seeing any type of infrastructure. It doesn’t make sense. I mean, what else do we need to do to put dollars
into those winter roads? Right now it doesn’t show anything. That’s where the activity is.
So what type of business case is the government operating in terms of putting money into our winter roads to show them that they support development? They might not like that in the region. They might say, well, they’re not showing any type of support for us on the Mackenzie Valley winter road. Maybe development is not looked upon as a favourable economic booster in the GNWT. So maybe we’ll take our time and we might have other thoughts to the hydraulic fracking, because they’re certainly not seeing the type of support we need on the winter road. The Minister will know from the amount of phone calls last year that we took, he understood about the conditions of our winter road. I think we need to really look at this again. Thank you.