David Ramsay

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I really appreciated the Member’s statement today. I think it’s good news for the community and for his riding when community and especially youth take the opportunity to look at growing locally produced fruits and in this case strawberries.

The Government of the Northwest Territories certainly supports that type of initiative. We’ve got a number of programs. We’ve had the opportunity to get some real money into communities through the Growing Forward federal program and we’ve also augmented that with some of our own programs in the area of Agriculture Development...

Mr. Speaker, as I mentioned earlier, the contract that the Member is talking about from 2010, we are working within the confines of that contract. It is not a fixed price contract. There are opportunities there and the contractor is paid as progress is made on that project for fixed prices, yes, but there are opportunities for costs to continue to go on. Certainly, we have taken every look at our options. Again, going forward, this is the best option for us. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Again, that was a decision the previous government made to get into the current contractual obligations with Ruskin. That contract follows a typical DOT contract which shifts only some of the risk to the contractor. It’s not a fixed price. There are eligible areas where we could see costs being overrun. That was a decision the previous government had made. Thank you.

It’s taken the Member about six years to start asking questions about the project. I can try to get that information to the Member by early next week.

I believe that was the same question I asked the previous government, whether or not I could get a copy of that contract. I believe at the time the answer was no and it would remain no.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In the contract that exists with Ruskin, again, it is not a fixed price contract. When there are change orders, some of those change orders are the responsibility of the owner, in this case the Government of the Northwest Territories, and we would certainly work with the contractor on a schedule and on costs, and we’ve been doing that all along.

Again, in March of this year it became apparent that the contractor would not be able to complete the project by November. So we had to look at different strategies to allow us to get that accomplished, and the option that we...

Thank you. I believe some of that work has been done in conjunction with the Territorial Farmer’s Association, a group that I’ve had the opportunity to meet with, and I’d be more than happy to try to get that information for the Member and put that together for him.

We also have this Community Gardens Program and I mentioned this earlier in this session in relation to a question that I was asked I believe by one of the other Regular Members. When I was down in Fort Simpson recently, we ran into two young university students who are working for ITI delivering the Community Garden Program, and...

Mr. Speaker, I have been quite clear in answering other questions from other Members yesterday. I will say it again. Going forward, this money has helped us negotiate our way out of a myriad of claims, construction claims on the project. We are going to work together with the contractor to see the project get completed this fall. I am not sure if the Member would prefer that we throw our hands up, we fight with the contractor, we go to court for years and years to come, we spend untold hundreds of thousands if not a million dollars-plus on legal fees and we don’t have a bridge open this fall...

Mr. Speaker, we have a team of lawyers that have been working on the contractual obligations, what our responsibility is going forward. I know the Member continually wants to go back to decisions that were made by the previous government. I have said it yesterday and I will say it again today, decisions that I have made since I became Minister last fall are decisions that I take responsibility for, I am accountable for. With our best advice and the options that were presented to us, we are doing the best for the taxpayer here in the NWT to get this project finished. We will continue to work...

We wouldn’t know that. Obviously, the ask is $10 million, but we wouldn’t be able to define that question at this stage in time. Thank you.