Michael McLeod

Mr. Speaker, the Member should know by now where the budget is. He approved portions of it in the last couple of budgets. The toll collection portion was approved over the last two budget years. It is a separate issue. It is a separate budget. It is kept separate because it is not part of the construction. It is a budget that will be maintained for the life of this bridge. The Auditor General indicated they wanted us to roll it in. We disagree. The construction project is going to end within the next while, but the toll collection is always going to be there. Within our budget for fish habitat...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It’s an expected comment, I guess, from this MLA that hasn’t agreed with anything that we’ve provided him. Mr. Speaker, on this occasion there has been a number of approvals to the design. It has the piers which have been signed off by a designer. We had the superstructure that also has been approved and signed off by a second designer. We also have some repairs on some of the deficiencies that were signed off by another engineer. Mr. Speaker, we have to realize that as a government we did overview on this design and all our engineers inspected it and approved it. We...

Mr. Speaker, all the information points to the issues being brought forward by climate change. We had zero degrees temperature for several days followed by extreme cold in that area. We have this year applied 230 tonnes of sand where historically we have provided 50. You can tell that there are some challenges in dealing with ice conditions. We need to look at what are the jurisdictions doing and including some testing of our own to try to address the issue as we feel that this is going to be an ongoing issue occurring every year. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I personally take full responsibility of all the issues that come forward on our projects on any of our operations. However, I certainly can’t control the weather that has been posing a lot of challenges to us. Mr. Speaker, this weekend we had a number of flights cancelled, as the Member indicated. We had a total of six flights that were scheduled to go into the community of Inuvik. Only one aircraft was able to land. It was not due to runway conditions. It was due to the high winds that we experienced over the weekend, especially in the Beaufort-Delta.

Mr. Speaker, we are looking at it already. We have looked at the device and try to see if it would work in the conditions that we live in. At this point, we are not convinced it will work. However, we will study options, if not this particular device, then maybe there are other things out there that could work to allow certain individuals to keep their jobs or whatever the case may be. We will continue to monitor. We will continue to research it and share the information with the Member. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, we haven’t considered amendments to the legislation as of yet and it may be a challenge to do so as we have conditions that other jurisdictions don’t have. We have minus 40 below weather and this could be a real challenge with the equipment. We don’t have licensed mechanics to install this device on vehicles in all our communities and any time there’s a malfunction, this would be an issue. At this point we’re looking at it. We don’t have all the answers and we’re not considering it until we can have further research on how it would work. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, we always try to take the opportunity, when the equipment is in the area, to work with communities to provide them with the information of what work will be done and what we can accommodate while the machine and equipment has the opportunity to do some chipsealing. Our intention, of course, is to try to get the whole road reconstructed first and then provide chipsealing. We are also focusing to do that in other areas of the NWT, but just to find adequate resources to reconstruct some of these roads is proving very challenging and it may take some time.

Mr. Speaker, as the Member knows, the Highway No. 7 is at the point of its life where it needs to be totally reconstructed. That is going to cost roughly $250 million or close to that amount. Mr. Speaker, we have identified several areas that we’re going to be working on and focusing on this year. There is some work that’s going to be done at kilometre 76 to develop a quarry, we’re going to be doing some work from kilometres 20 to 37, and doing some embankment investigation and some construction at kilometre 170. Those are the areas that we have targeted for this year. I think, Mr. Speaker...

I can commit to the Member that we can do some class D costing of what it would take to build a winter road to his community and maybe look at a number of scenarios to see what we’re spending now and what it would cost to do a winter road overland to his communities. Thank you.

As the Member knows, there are challenges in looking at construction of an ice road over the lake to Lutselk’e. There are serious issues when it comes to ice conditions and pressure ridges and things of that nature. There’s also the safety of travellers on a lake the size of the Great Slave Lake. We are also monitoring the possibility of future development such as Avalon, which is in a stage where it’s still being considered as to what their plans will be in the long term. We can certainly start looking at routes that might be preferred, that would work, and start costing them out, but it...