Wally Schumann

Yes, I would, Mr. Chair.

All our bulk fuel is purchased in the summer, as I've said. That's our normal practice for the marine summer resupply. The final price of gasoline and other fuels is based on the cost of fuel and the cost of shipment to each community. The changes in sale prices are based on these costs, and we won't know what those prices are going to be typically until the end of fall, until we gather all this information.

Also, on the Member's first note, too, another effort that we are doing to help address the situation is MTS plans to mobilize and stage all fuel and dry cargo in the Nunakput region and...

Mr. Speaker, I wish to table the following three documents entitled "2017/2018 Annual Report - Northwest Territories Agricultural Products Marketing Council"; "NWT Oil and Gas Annual Report 2018"; and "Annual Report 2018-2019 NWT Office of the Regulator of Oil and Gas Operations." Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, our government is following through on its mandate commitment to strengthen connections with our public and private sector partners to secure funding for strategic infrastructure projects across the Northwest Territories. Investments in our public highway systems help to connect communities, improve public safety, ensure the efficient delivery of essential goods and services, support tourism, increase our resiliency to climate change, reduce the cost of living, and create training and employment opportunities. Investments also help attract interest from industry in the exploration...

Our department and our officials are in constant contact with the City of Yellowknife with what is happening at the visitor information centre. One of the things that has happened since we shut down the Northern Frontier Visitors Centre and moved it over to city hall. I took a lot of questions in the House about how that is going to work out. Things with the city have moved along quite well.

One of the things that has happened since we have closed down the visitors centre is the number of tourists who actually went to the city's tourists information centre has almost doubled. The department was...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Normally I credit the Member for doing his homework, but there were three designs, actually, that we have received on this. I'm just teasing him. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

We received three concept designs as part of this planning process, and through that, we want to go to the next step to develop a schematic design over the summer in 2019, but this is going to largely depend on some of the technical work that has been recently wrapped up on this building. We are waiting to hear back on these geotechnical and structural reports. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

The Department of Infrastructure did not pay for any off-specification fuel that we received, and the supplier arranged for the recovery of the off-specification fuel at their own expense and took it back.

Yes. We can postpone a lot of capital projects to do that. That is going to cost a lot of money. That is not something I am willing to do without an analysis of what this thing would even fathom what this would cost, never mind the permitting that would have to be obtained to do this type of thing. At this point, I am going to continue as the Minister of Infrastructure to work with my colleague in the federal government on this issue. I will update the House when I have a call with him in the coming weeks. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

The Member is making his point here. We've talked to different Ministers. Different Assemblies have talked to the federal government about this dredging issue in Hay River and the Port of Tuktoyaktuk. It's an ongoing issue. The federal government got out of this racket in about 2012. That was when they cancelled their program, and they left the jurisdictions hanging. Members and Ministers from that point forward have pushed this issue for a long time. We have in this Assembly, I myself particularly since I have become the Minister of Transportation and the Minister of Infrastructure, have been...

As I said, I do not know if the risk is worth the reward at this point, without some more research and analysis of what implications it would have on the industry. I would certainly like to have a look at it, but I would love to sit down with the Member and have a little better understanding and conversation with him of how he thinks we could implement this thing. Maybe we could even pull some of the people from this industry together and have a chat about what these things are going to look like going forward, as we renew our strategy in the 2020-2021 session. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.