Wally Schumann

I believe there's two questions; I'll answer both of them. First of all, the returning of phone calls to NUL. The first phone call I believe to the Premier was based on the Hay River franchise, and that's in arbitration right now, and I wouldn't be doing anyone any good to engage in a conversation when that process is going on. My other recollection is that ATCO phoned the Premier about getting out of their franchise agreement for ATCO gas in Inuvik. So that's the two phone calls; first part of his question.

The second part, NUL is free to any time submit material to the Government of the...

Mr. Speaker, the department data indicates that the Louis Cardinal is sufficient and it meets the adequate needs of the capacity of the region right now, and we continue to track that with the data received on the volume of traffic on the Louis Cardinal.

The other thing we do, and the Member stated, we're throwing money around with capital investments. We just replaced the bottom of the Louis Cardinal in the last cycle year, in the last season, and we're about to rebuild the engines on the Louis Cardinal this coming winter.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The department is continually working to improve the transportation system. Available resources rely on asset management tools which we use continually on an ongoing basis to make strategic operational decisions around all our assets. But moving forward, we have to maximize what we have with the limited funding we have, and that makes choices pretty tough sometimes. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

With respect to this northern contractor and the employment of residents in Fort Liard on this contract, I'm glad to report to the House that almost 31 per cent of the workforce in June was from the community, 40 per cent in July and 43 per cent in August, and that includes some residents from Nahanni Butte as well.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Department of Transportation uses every opportunity to maximize northern involvement in residents and delivering programs and services to upgrade and maintain all the highways in the Northwest Territories including the Liard Highway. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I cannot commit to putting it into Bundle 3. As this Legislative Assembly know, ours infrastructure needs across the territory are huge, and I'll say the same thing here I've said at FPT table. We could take every dollar the federal government has put into infrastructure, all three bundles that the government has proposed and this country could spend every dime of it just on upgrading the road system into Canada. So the limited amount of funds the Northwest Territories gets, we have to spread it across the complete territory to meet the needs of all residents.

If we were to get into a situation where the Louis be serviced in the region, we do have the backup area that the Member alluded to in his Member’s statement that we could probably put in the water and bring into service to meet the emergency needs of that, and then in the long-term, if that was the case, if something drastically happened to the boat, we'd have to look at the long-term plans of how we're going to replace one of these units. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Yes, I will have a look at that. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

---Applause

I just had to clarify in my head what your whole question was. ATCO is a big outfit and they do have a lot of money, but the problem moving forward for this government is that - it's not the money it's our borrowing capacity moving forward. We need to have engagement with the federal government. If we decide to expand the Taltson Project, we need to have a buyer at the end of the day. This government is engaged in consultation or conversations with other end users who will purchase this power and to do that at the end of the day we believe that the Taltson project is going to require a subsidy...

As I've stated, we use management tools to make strategic operational decisions on our equipment and our assets and we will continue to use that, and moving forward, I will update the Member where this is at in the queue. But, as I've said, we have very limited funds moving forward and we need to stretch these out across the whole Northwest Territories.