Thank you, Mr. Chair. I thank the Minister, and thanks to the representatives for being here. Obviously, we’re probably …(inaudible)…for all the years of service now that you’re leaving.

I’d like to start about transportation and maybe the overall strategy of highways in the Northwest Territories. I guess some of the frustrating part has been the fact that over the years the department has been starting a project and stopping a project. The road to Fort Res, the road to Fort Smith, even

the road to Fort Simpson have been worked on sporadically by doing a couple hundred kilometres here, a couple kilometres there, but there’s no consistency. I think for a few years there was consistency and they were getting the roadway done. I know we’re doing a multi-model strategy on transportation and I’m hoping that from there we’re going to have a plan going forward of how we implement this, how do we get all these… Some of these roads are really good. I was just on the road to Res last weekend. I’ve been to Smith recently. Those are good roads, but it would be nice if they were chipsealed and we completed that and upgraded it for the residents as well as tourism.

The road to Simpson, obviously, Highway No. 7, like Mr. Menicoche, as he indicated to us, I think it’s key. I think they’re key to our highway system as far as for tourism. I’ve always been a supporter of upgrading that road. I know there are hundreds of thousands of people that travel from BC, from Alberta, BC up to the Yukon and up to Alaska, and if we only captured a small percentage of them we’d probably double our tourism road numbers easily in one year. I think we need to figure out a plan going forward on how we’re implementing that two or three kilometres in each section each year to get to the point where we actually have them completed. I think we’re in the process of maybe doing the last section towards Res, which is going to be exciting as far as being able to drive there and not have to deal with gravel roads.

That overall structure, we talk about Mackenzie Valley Highway and now it’s almost been a slant. It seems like, from our perspective, that there’s been a slant to talk about the Slave Geological area. Obviously, a very economical area for us, the diamond mines and a lot of that support there, a lot of that GDP there. But I think we’ve got to set our priorities of where our people are too. It’s not that I don’t support that concept of getting that road more permanent so the winters last longer, but I think it’s going to have to be a partnership with some of the people that are invested in that area. I don’t know where we are numbers-wise of that partnership but I think that’s something we have to work on.

One of the areas that I’ve heard complaints about, and I’ve talked to NTCL, one of our shipping companies, they’ve seen some of our infrastructure requirements and plans and a lot of them don’t involve marine. We’re focused on roads. Obviously, I think that’s an important area, too, but we need to take in those type of industries, as well and the need for them. Obviously, I’m going to mention my, it’s not two words, it’s only one word. It’s dredging, dredging of the Hay River. We’ve heard from other Members the need of dredging in different communities. We know it was a situation with low water last year to service the communities throughout the Northwest Territories. I think there was probably an additional cost to Fort Good Hope,

to Inuvik and some of those places that didn’t get their product this year. I think we need to look at that. I know it’s a federal responsibility, but we as the territorial government have to work out a plan of how… We’re the ones that are affected. The federal government sits in Ottawa still and they could give two cents about what’s happening up here. We are the ones that are being affected. It’s our residents that are being affected by the low water, by the amount of sediment that’s in the river systems. We need to work on dredging. We need to figure out the number, then we need to go to the federal government and lobby them to get funds to do the dredging required in the Hay River area as well as in the other parts of the Northwest Territories. I think that’s very important.

I’ll bring up another issue that I know I’ve brought to the attention of several people before. It’s the trucking regulations. There’s just an inconsistency there. I don’t know how to get the department to move forward on evaluating the trucking regulations. We’ve got an experimental tri-drive program right now. It seems to be working and I’ve heard some good things from industry about it, but there are too many inconsistencies about our weights, about our dimensions, about what a pickup does, and if a pickup is a commercial pickup but it’s pulling a trailer, now that’s completely different. Whereas, in Alberta if a pickup is pulling anything, a pickup is a pickup. We’ve deemed it to be a different type of unit. I know some of that has come about from the bridge but the point is that we want to be supportive of industry and business and that type of activity is not supportive to business. We’ve got a lot of small businesses that run pickups and keep it under a small weight because that’s what they can afford to run. We’ve got guys that are running bobcats, running trailers to do work, to bring materials to the job sites in different parts of the communities and some of them have to go across the bridge, and that’s an extra toll and they’re just adding it to the cost. We need to look at this regulation stuff.

This licence plate on the front versus the back and as soon as you cross the border you’re supposed to switch it over. We’ve got to find a solution to that. That’s not conducive to our territory, Alberta and the Northwest Territories who are linked together. That’s where 95 percent of our products come from is Alberta. We’ve got to straighten these regulations out. It continues to be a problem and I hear it from all the industry guys. We have people that have company trucks and if they’re a small enough operation they’re switching over to a private plate just to be able to avoid it. We should know that we have a problem with this system if people are having to circumvent the system, charge their company their personal times and reverse this just to avoid the government’s regulations and lack of changing their regulations.

The last point I have is just a concern that I’m hearing in Hay River as far as the Hay River maintenance garage. I could be corrected. I thought it was a territorial maintenance garage in Hay River, and it seems like there’s more and more maintenance happening in different regions, and I want to point out that I think that maintenance garage in Yellowknife has been growing, the maintenance staff in Yellowknife have been growing, and I think less and less products have been moving back to Hay River to be repaired and some is being done here. I guess it’s kind of slippage. Sometimes we let some of this stuff happen and it does slip away, the fact that some of these things happen, but we need to refocus where our maintenance crew is.

I’ll have some detailed questions later on, but those are my general comments.