I’m going to join my colleagues on this side of the House today and also weigh in on this issue of the Deh Cho Bridge. I haven’t talked about the Deh Cho Bridge for a long time, and I’m going to direct my questions to the Premier, if I may, today.

We’re aware of the situation with the Deh Cho Bridge. It was fraught with challenges and setbacks and change in contractor and all kinds of things. Everybody was out there on the job doing their best to ensure the delivery of this bridge project as close to on schedule and on budget as possible. It is not a perfect science. Construction is not a perfect science, so when it became apparent that some of the scour rock had to be hauled from a further distance. There is such a thing as agreements between contractors and subcontractors. They aren’t always signed out there on the workplace, but the work gets done and it’s done in good faith. That’s what I want to say.

Now we have a situation here where we have a couple pots of money. We have money for deficiencies, we have money for holdbacks, and we have a northern contractor that was really owed about $1.3 million and that amount has now been written down to $373,000. You can see, the Cabinet can see, the Premier can see from the support on this side of the House that Rowe’s Construction is a territorial company, a long-standing territorial company that has come to the aid of the GNWT on many projects, because projects run into problems. It’s not a perfect science. Rowe’s has been, I think, a very good corporate citizen in the contracting that they have done for this government.

Now we have the situation before us today where we’re talking about $373,000. I’d like to ask the Premier: Is there money in any of the pots of money either from holdbacks or deficiencies that could allow us to pay this northern contractor? Everyone else has been paid. The Minister of Transportation has said we had to pay Ruskin, they built us a bridge. They didn’t build a bridge without the subcontractors there to help them and support them to get the job done.