Michael McLeod

I guess the committee didn’t provide feedback because we didn’t have an opportunity to brief them. There was no opportunity to go in front of committee to present on the licence plate. We did talk to North America’s leader in licence plate design, 3M Corporation, who provided us some advice. We talked to the NWT Tourism Association, who provided us some advice. We also talked to the veterans, the Legion, the municipal officers, the RCMP, and we also consulted with other jurisdictions.

We didn’t go out and do a full-blown consultation process because we were not planning to change the design. It...

We are right now advising the public that they can turn their plate in and we’ll dispose of it for them, or they can keep it. We have no other options available to the public. We are not planning to try to put them on the market. There is a concern from the environment as these older plates were dipped in some toxic chemicals that were required to prevent corrosion that we are concerned about. Thank you.

There are roughly 30,000 plates that will be issued over the next 18 months and all the revenue that’s collected is intended to pay for the actual cost of producing that plate and that’s where the dollars will go. This is not intended to generate any additional revenue except for cost recovery. Thank you.

I thought I had answered that question. Mr. Speaker, the intent is to have everybody replace the old plate with the new design, the new colours and the new plates we wanted to have on all the travelling public, all the vehicles on the road on our highway systems that are registered in the NWT replaced by 2011. So if the person is required to re-register the vehicle, they would have to get a new plate. Thank you.

That is a good question. Mr. Speaker, the company that we had a contract with for many, many years out of Edmonton gave us notification several years ago that they would not be producing new plates for us, we would have to find a new company and the equipment they were utilizing was to the point in the lifecycle that it needed to be replaced. At any rate, even if we maintained the old plate, the cost would have been probably either the same as what we’re charging now, $10, or more.

We’ve gone to new material. We are no longer using steel for our plates. We are using aluminum. We’ve moved away...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the intent of designing a new plate and having the general public perhaps have limited input as we went forward was to retain the shape, of course, of the polar bear and at the same time increase the safety of the plate and allow the RCMP to be able to view the plate under limited light situations. Our intent is to have all plates in the Northwest Territories replaced over the next 18 months. So as you come forward to renew your plates and have a new plate issued, we think we will be able to capture all the plates that need to be replaced by December 2011...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I rise today to provide information on the new and improved NWT licence plate that will be available to the public starting July 1st of this year.

The Department of Transportation has been working closely with groups across the NWT, and has consulted with the RCMP, Municipal Enforcement and the Royal Canadian Legion, NWT Tourism, commercial carriers, manufacturers and other Canadian jurisdictions to update our licence plate and bring it up to current design standards.

Our shift to a new licence plate began when the discussions with the manufacturer of our current plate...

Mr. Speaker, sitting down with the municipality we can do right away including the MLA. We will have to work around our schedules. We have done some financial analysis and looked at different options that we have in front of us. I think we can probably rule out the concept of pavement overlay. That is expensive even on the southern parts, even in Alberta. It is a very expensive undertaking. Chipseal we know is something that is relatively cheap compared to pavement. There are other products that are in between, in terms of cost. We have to take a look at that.

Of course, the Member’s riding is...

I have driven on the road, the Mackenzie Valley, all the way to Norman Wells, a beautiful, scenic ride, a smooth ride. I didn’t see any goats, Mr. Speaker. However, it is a nice ride and there are certainly bottlenecks along the route. There are places that a bridge would address a lot of the concern and extend the season.

The Bear River is a challenge every year. It’s an area that has overflow; it’s an area that takes a long time to construct an ice road. There is a very large detour that we have to build annually and it’s costly. So I would like to be able to, at some point, come forward with...

I’m glad there are still some fans out there that support the concept of P3. I still think it is a mechanism and tool for us to look at ways we can approach some of our infrastructure that doesn’t involve the federal government coming forward to fully fund a project. We need to do that. We have to take stock of how things have transpired over the last while with the Deh Cho Bridge.

We have certainly a number of bridges out there that would need to be built over the next while. The Liard, and the Peel and the Bear are all part of that, Bosworth Creek. We need funding for those projects, and I...