Thank you, Mr. Chair. I want to focus in, as well, on the rather extraordinary request for an additional $40 million this fiscal year, tens of millions of dollars the following fiscal year to be brought forward in our capital budget. We have already heard about unexpected expenditures of $50 million and $20 million. That’s $70 million. Possibly it’s more than that in our operating supp here today. Now we are pushing this $210 million, $230 million in unexpected expenditures at this moment in time and with the schedule proposed.

I ask myself two questions. The first is: Is this a prudent decision to make, given what we know about unexpected expenditures already this year and the new world of climate change with the consequences that we are realizing? Number two, does this request need to be this large, or are there options later in the year to adjust the budget based on actual performances up to that time starting with an examination of is this prudent? I have serious cash flow concerns based on the information provided by the Minister. We have already heard, just a few minutes ago, that our $100 million cushion will be disappearing this fiscal year. In fact, projections are very possible that that cushion could be down to below $10 million for the 18th Assembly

and especially if we have further unexpected expenditures or continue on this course.

We have already heard that the unexpected expenditures will reduce our borrowing limit, as I mentioned, $70 million so far in the operational supp, and we are only seven months into the year, so who knows what to expect, and again, we know that Mackenzie River difficulties with water level will have unexpected costs with that.

Our supplementary reserve, which is intended for these sorts of things, will be overspent by hundreds of percent. Again, this reflects on how well we are managing our budgets: hundreds of percent beyond what we have designated as our supplementary reserve. What has been the performance to date? Is this an extremely high-performance company that’s doing this work? The goal was 30 kilometres last winter. Only nine kilometres were completed so that we could not even recover the first federal loonie that we were promised to collect for every 10 kilometres that we completed. Not a sterling performance, albeit there’s all kinds of reservations on that. This was a start-up project and so on. There was a lot of training to be done and so on.

What else would I consider on whether this was prudent or not? We’ve learned that after only one season of freshet, or spring melt, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and others have identified six serious environmental concerns that had to be remedied through redesign and mitigation work. That’s one season of melt in this extremely tough arctic environment where roads have rarely, if ever, been built like this before.

Finally, there is still no complete design for the critical 10 kilometres and the middle of this road or towards the northern end where the road, in fact, crosses the remnant Wisconsin ice glacier of long ago which, we’ve realized through research in the recent year or two, lies just beneath the surface and is presenting incredible challenges to our engineers.

Also, many subcontractors for this huge project exist and they’ve made commitments that are not consistent with an expedited schedule here. That is something that perhaps through one way or another could be dealt with. I don’t know, but I would think we’d want to. We’ve tried to push hard to include northern content, so I would think we’d want to try and deal with that.

Finally, there were 325 employees during the first year. The proposal is for 600 employees this coming winter. Now, talk about a training challenge. This project was justified, really, on the basis of economic activity for a depressed region of the NWT. I suspect those 600 employees, a lot of them will be coming from the south. How well does that serve the reasons for this project?

In conclusion, I would say it is imprudent at this time to be letting out such an advanced schedule of expenditures.

My second question, and that’s a clear conclusion based on lots of evidence and reasoning, the second one, does it need to be this large? It certainly doesn’t. This is a premature request. I’ve already mentioned we’re not in the best fiscal situation to be doing these sorts of things. I’ve already mentioned the record of performance to date, but there is a window of opportunity for all of that to change or go even more severely in that direction. To me, it would seem prudent to wait until we next gather in early February, 4th of February, at

which time we could approve additional expenditures for this project.

The season starts in November and goes through April. That’s what? Seven or eight months – November, December, January, February, March, April – so there’s plenty of time. Surely they would have the dollars to get them started and well into the winter. If they need another $10 million or $15 million, that is what the request should be to get them to that point in time. This, to me, would be a prudent approach. Then we could easily deal with a request based on actual evidence. What a concept.

Does it need to be this large? No, it doesn’t. Is it prudent? No, it’s not. I know that the Minister is aware that the unexpected expenditures could go up dramatically in the next several months as well. I’ll leave it at that, Mr. Chair. Thank you.