I thank the Member for his comments. His concern about can we afford to accelerate the Inuvik-Tuk highway and the potential lost employment and extending it out over the year, the bottom line concern about the project is to get the job done. We want to keep it to budget, $299 million I think is what the budget is.

The reason we went to a negotiated contract was to maximize the involvement of local contractors and local employment, which the project is delivering, I believe, in spades. But at the end of the day, it’s not a social program. The concern is to get it done. If we can get it done in three years, keep everybody employed going flat out and end up with a project that’s on budget, then I think we’d all be happy. If we deliberately let it run out an extra year and run up our costs over and above the $299 million, we would be having a whole different discussion in this House about cost overruns and why did we do that and we should be managing this project properly. So we are focusing on making sure we maximize all the northern benefit we can, and if we can do it in three years, and it’s the contractor that has come forward with that work schedule based on his and our collective experience, we think it has value.

The issue of limited expenditures in education, if you did a 10-year longitudinal look at the capital plan, I think you would see that there has been, over time, a very equitable sharing of expenditures. In the last government, I can remember the extensive, intense discussion about the big school, super-school, in Inuvik, which at that time was before the bridge, was one of the biggest capital projects we had going, plus all the other school work that has been done across the land. So it’s very difficult to look at one capital plan for one year and make a determination that somehow one particular area over another is getting shortchanged. If you take the long-term view, I think we can make the case. Overall, we manage to address the needs of all the areas of our responsibilities.

As I indicated as well, there are resources to help sort out the issue with the French schools. My understanding is there are still discussions going on, but there are resources built in to help resolve that.

The air tanker upgrades, to me, especially after this last year, are critical. It’s in the neighbourhood of $27 million. That number was made clear. We’ve briefed committee, this government, last government. We have going on its way to committee, all the detailed reports we’ve done in the last seven years on this issue. These air tanker upgrades, we know that the planes can do the work that’s necessary. We have watched them now under real life battlefield conditions here and we’ve seen them operate down south. We have some very significant problems with avgas and accessibility. It’s got lead; it’s being phased out. The tankers we have are older than most of us. Currently, the 215s are older than most of us sitting in this room. An upgrade of those tankers would cost about $120 million and it’s not a cost that I could, in good conscious, or we as a government, in good conscious, could bring forward. We are convinced that this is a critical way to go. We have

to get in a queue. It’s going to take years to get these planes made and we need to be prepared. If the new normal, God forbid, is what we saw last summer, then we are definitely going to want to make sure we can assure the people of the Northwest Territories that we have the tools ready for the people, men and women in the air and on the ground, the thin line that protects us from the ravages of forest fires, that they are properly equipped to defend our interests and make sure that they protect their safety while they’re doing that.

I appreciate the Member’s comments about the things he does see as positive. The issue of highways are good. It’s a challenge. The roads are important. Some of us, our communities have no roads, and they remind us of that constantly as we talk about the investing in highways, but they are critical infrastructure for accessibility and economic development.

We are doing the job necessary, I believe, with committee assistance on health facilities. We, too, share an ongoing concern about deferred maintenance and not letting it get built up on us to the extent where it has in the past where it becomes a crushing burden and starts eating up all our capital. Thank you.