Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I find this a very frustrating workday, today. To be quite honest with everybody, I wish that we had been able to sit and go through every detail of the entire future of this project before we came and thought about putting dollars into it. In actual fact, I wish that this had been dealt with 20 years ago, when diamond mines were at their height. Maybe the diamond mines would have actually paid for a lot more of our infrastructure if we had made that part of the deal. However, we can't go back. We can only go forward.
In regard to what the Minister of Finance said in terms of strategic investment on the three major infrastructure projects, yes, that was in our mandate, but I don't think we ever had a conversation about what direction we were actually going to take. We knew that those were the three major infrastructure projects that the territory had and that we were interested, but we also knew that we do not have the money for all of them. The Slave Geological Province road is a $1-billion project, and we do not have $1 billion to finish it. It's just not part of our reality. The diamond mines will very likely be closed before this road is fully open and operational, and I know that there are other opportunities for more roads. Do we even have the money to contribute 25 percent of the total cost? That is also an unknown and very frustrating, because how much money are we going to put into a project that we are not sure we will actually be able to financially see through to the very end?
The other part of it is: will Nunavut actually contribute their half of the road, which goes up to the Arctic Ocean, which is a huge component of this project? I feel like there are a lot of questions about whether or not we can make this work and whether or not it will make it to the Arctic Ocean. That being said, I would hate to wait and then 20 years from now wish that we had actually looked into this and wish that we had actually done a research study to see if this was feasible rather than having the people of the Northwest Territories continue to question where we should put our money, along with everybody sitting around this table here today, because the economy is important. When we went door to door, and I know a lot of the people in Yellowknife heard a lot of the same things, one of the primary concerns of people of the Northwest Territories or at least, sorry, in Yellowknife, was our economy and was the future of jobs in the Northwest Territories. We are sitting here with an opportunity to leverage some serious federal dollars and essentially provide jobs for a $2.5-million investment on our part and a $7.5-million investment on the federal government's part, but, that being said, in order for us to actually maintain benefit or get any benefit from that money, we have to actually have northern employment and northern contractors working on this.
If we look at the Members' statements we have heard recently from the Member for Monfwi in regard to, say, the road to Whati, 40 percent of that was northern contractors, and 40 percent is not enough in my mind. That is not good enough for the money that we are keeping in the Northwest Territories. If we are going to be looking at spending money and saying that this does create jobs in the Northwest Territories, then we have to be diligent in making sure that we are actually getting something for our own money and that we are actually leveraging the federal dollars and putting them into our own economy because, otherwise, there is absolutely no sense in doing this because, yes, while we say we are open for business, we definitely are not open to be taken advantage of anymore. We need to start maintaining some benefit from the resources of the Northwest Territories, and we need to start working with Indigenous governments and making sure that people are benefitting. Right now, our people are hurting, and that is not the case. I am going to just go through my notes here and make sure I am not rambling too much.
Like the Minister of Finance also said, it is up to us to make this work. We have not done a great job of that in the past with the road to Whati and with Stanton Foundation. I have multiple people in my riding who have not been paid who were sub-contractors from larger contractors through the Stanton Territorial Hospital Project.
We are not doing any kind of service to the people of the Northwest Territories when we are inviting southern companies to come up and then not even pay the Northerners with the money we are hoping to keep in the North. I think that it is our responsibility, to provide the people of the Northwest Territories with as much information as possible. While this supplementary of $2.5 million is looking into an environmental assessment, that is what it is doing. It is providing people of the Northwest Territories with information so that we can be able to say, "Yes, we are going to do this going forward," or, "No, we are not going to do this going forward," and be able to have an evidence-based decision as to what infrastructure project we are actually strategically going to put our money behind. Thank you, Madam Chair.