Merci, Monsieur le President. I am going to be voting against this supplementary appropriation. It contains a $27.75 million settlement on the Mackenzie Valley Fibre Link.
The original cost of this project, as we learned yesterday, Mr. Speaker, was $81.3 million. It has now ballooned to $194 million. That's more than twice the original cost estimate. And I think part of the problem, Mr. Speaker, is that this was done as a P3, and P3s lead to these kind of unexpected, unanticipated, conclusions. And this isn't the first time we've had to have supplementary appropriations brought forward to this House to settle these really complicated arrangements and deals.
So I oppose this, and I think that in approving this supplementary appropriation, it really kind of rewards poor project management. If there had been any effort on the part of the Department of Finance to try to absorb some of these costs internally, find other areas of efficiencies and so on, I might be a little bit more generous in this. But I'm just not prepared to allow this expenditure of money for a project that can and probably should have been done differently. And, Mr. Speaker, I'm going to be voting against this supplementary appropriation. Mahsi.