Thank you, Mr. Speaker. To inform the Members of this House, because this decision was made quite a while ago to accelerate the ice road there and keep the winter ferry going as long as we could until the road was up to capacity was made in 2013, I believe, 2014. They began to do the accelerated construction of the ice road crossing. This was mainly around the energy concerns for the community of Inuvik and the low volumes that possibly shut down the kill well at the time. A propane mixture was going to have to be introduced to get through this dry spell of the well until something else was figured out in the long-term.
That’s not the case, however. The number of propane trucks has not increased in volume. In fact, the number has pretty much decreased in volume since 2013 to now. In discussions with our department and the proponents of the kill well, there’s no longer a need for us to have the ice road accelerated. There are also contingency plans put in place to have propane in the community to carry them through this closure. The other part of this is the weather around the Dempster. In 2015 the road was closed 40 per cent of the time that we did the winter ferry service, and that was at a cost of $1.8 million for 36 days.