Bill Braden

That’s okay; we get each other's mail all the time. It’s okay, Madam Chair.

Mr. Speaker, in news reports last week there was indication that the mine has missed some critical deadlines in this process. I won’t go into the detail here, of course, but I would like to ask the Minister if our government is taking any notice of this and what pressures are we bringing to bear on either the process, or DIAND or the company to comply with rules that really have already been in place? Thank you.

Thank you. The area that concerns me the most of this whole project, Mr. Chairman, has already been flagged by Ms. Lee, and that is the mention in the bill of an airport user fee of $6.6 million out of the total $11.2 million that will be somehow assessed and collected. Six-point-six million dollars is an extraordinary amount of money to assess on the, I think, relatively small number of users for this airport. I recall in some briefings, Mr. Chairman, that we were told Yellowknife is actually a very busy airport compared to others in Canada for the number of passenger movements. That may well...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Are we going into this with a bottom line of some kind? The Minister has indicated that there might be a financial line there, but there are other things about the timing and the standards that will be set. Are these things also part of our negotiating approach? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'll take that, but I think the criteria that I have here is I want to see that Yellowknife and the Northwest Territories is within range of the requirements that are being imposed on airports across Canada.

A couple of other areas in here have to do with the timing of this. Of course, so much of this was forced by the tragedy of 9-11, but that goes back three years now. Now we have this accelerated plan. The government was caused to approve a special warrant on June 30th, four months ago. I would like to know when did the planning and the scoping really start in...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to talk this afternoon too, about cleaning up our act. It is not quite as noble as my colleagues here, but the problem that I am looking at is one that has been around for a long time. That is the legacy that is left over after 60 years of gold mining here in the Yellowknife area. That is the ongoing saga of trying to seek some kind of approval to the processes by which the Con and the Giant mines are going to be cleaned up.

Mr. Speaker, my other colleagues have spoken of this issue many times in this Assembly and in the past one. We continue to see a...

Thanks, Mr. Chairman. There are a few other areas in this thing that I will want to get into, but with the time I have left I guess I’d like to go with this CATSA deal that we got struck with in Yellowknife. It doesn’t seem appropriate that they can be totally arbitrary about what we get and what we don’t get. I mean, every airport in Canada must be in some certain kind of circumstance. If Yellowknife’s situation was such that putting in the explosive system required a huge amount of extra work, can’t there have been some kind of allowance or provision made for that? Perhaps one way to...

So we had something that hadn’t been anticipated. Is this a repair or refit, Mr. Chairman, or does this advance the whole project in its entirety for replacement?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In an earlier debate in this session we talked quite a bit about accountability and debt and the requirement of government to monitor and keep track of where these funds are going to ensure that at least they’re going into the purpose originally intended. On this one here, like all others, I would like to ask if there is a way we are indeed monitoring, showing proof, and that we have a way if things don’t go as planned that we can recover or have some recourse to getting back these funds. Thank you.

Madam Chair, I’m wondering about the outcome of these programs. Perhaps I should start by asking to what degree are organizations that receive contributions accountable for results or performance? Thank you.