Michael McLeod

Mr. Speaker, I am not sure if that was something that we had indicated in our response to the Member at the time. I believe we had discussed the merits of the program. I had raised that there were some NGOs that were raising concern and that we needed to further investigate. That is where the situation still stands, from my standpoint. I would have to have further discussions. We will provide correspondence to the Member. Thank you.

The Member’s assigning a lot of blame to the Bridge Corporation. I’m not quite as ready to do so. He’s mentioned a lot of extra costs that are being borne by the government so far. I guess there’s been a position and a portion of another position that’s dedicated to the project and maybe some of the travel. The rest of the costs that are being incurred are being absorbed by the project and the project budget. We have and will continue to see how our partner in this P3 program is working. We have to remember it’s probably the largest project we’ve had for this government and it’s one of the...

I’m not sure which one of the three questions he wanted me to answer in that barrage of questions he just tossed out there. The Deh Cho Corporation, of course it’s accountable first and foremost, I guess, to the owners of the company, which are the Dene and Métis in the community of Fort Providence. They have an obligation to us as a government through our agreement to build and construct and design this facility that we’re working on, which is the Deh Cho Bridge.

Yes, Mr. Speaker, as I indicated earlier in my response, we have inserted our staff and we are participating in all aspects of discussions on this project. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, we have taken more of a hands-on approach through our resources and have people involved with all the different activities that are taking place, all the different discussions and those negotiations. As we develop and move forward on settling and coming to a final price on this project, we incorporated some requirements that needed to be addressed, including rolling in the cost of some of the claims and including the termination fees as we move forward. We would like to have all the different loose ends tied up and be able to come forward with some confidence to the Members and...

The Member knows full well that we don’t have that information at this time. We would expect the cost, any kind of termination fees would include work that was done up to this date on this portion and this phase of the contract and some profit margins also. Thank you.

Maybe the Member didn’t hear what I said. I did indicate that we did have an approved design in place that required further testing. So we did have a design at the time. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, we expect to have a contractor in place. There are a number of contractors that have come forward. There are some serious negotiations. We have some preliminary numbers that we are looking at for the Bridge Corporation and ourselves are looking at. We are quite confident that we are going to resolve that and have an agreement by some time later early in this new year. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, there are a number of unknowns in this project, as we speak. The Bridge Corporation is negotiating with a contractor about price until sometime later on this month. It will continue to be ongoing until we have an agreement in place.

Of course, there may be termination fees that more than likely will come forward from the contractor that the Bridge Corporation couldn’t make a positive agreement with that we will probably have to deal with. There are still some outstanding claims that we don’t have the numbers on. Mr. Speaker, our goal is to include all of the issues that I mentioned...

We feel that the bridge will be constructed with the price that we had indicated earlier and we are trying to stay on budget. Thank you.