Jane Groenewegen

Mr. Speaker, two motions were passed in the 15th Assembly. I believe they were unanimously passed by the Regular Members of this House.

The Premier had to have known that there were concerns on this side of the House with the Deh Cho Bridge project. It has been widely publicized that there were questions and concerns.

The fact that he'd had a chance to think, for I don't know how many months, he might be the Premier, and with headlines written for months in advance that he was going to be the Premier, I can't help it if he didn't assign that cabinet portfolio. But that was his choice.

Let’s go on...

I had a chance to look over a bit more Hansard here. I want to go back to this. You know, these things just don’t go away just because we decide to sweep them under the carpet.

The concession agreement was signed on September 28. We found out November 27 — two months later. Now, the Premier said we didn’t ask the right question. We didn’t say, “Did you sign the concession agreement in the last government?” We weren’t that direct.

Here’s a quote from Hansard, again on October 19. This is Mr. Ramsay: “Are we going to be able to see the concession agreement? Are we going to be able to see the...

In light of the absolute barrage of questions that the Premier was asked, and given that he had full knowledge that the concession agreement had already been signed, I want to ask the Premier did he not feel that he had any duty to the Members of this House to just inform us of this very significant milestone which had been passed on the Deh Cho Bridge project: that the concession agreement had, in fact, already been signed? We had to find this out weeks and weeks later, after asking all session.

Did the Premier feel no obligation to open this and transparently share something that significant...

Mr. Speaker, the Premier has sort of inferred that he doesn’t like the idea of this debate. I can certainly understand why. It’s not a debate that he could actually win, because he says that we did not ask for the updated cost/benefit analysis and we didn’t pass any motions in this House asking for the concession agreement.

I’m looking at Hansard from May 10, when Mr. Ramsay states that it is very important that the government shares the information with the Members of the House so that we can ask questions so we can access the risk to the government, speaking of the Deh Cho Bridge project...

This is an extremely elaborate facility to be built. I don’t know what it topped out at — $50 million or so. There were things designed into the building for meeting together. I definitely know there was an aboriginal healing meeting room component. I toured the facility; I saw it.

If you’ve got this kind of money to throw around, I would rather see it go into some kind of programming. It isn’t about the stones and the bricks and mortar. That isn’t what’s going to heal people. If you want to bring people in and have elders come and talk to the people, put the money into programming.

SMCC in Hay...

Mr. Speaker, the Premier a few days ago committed in this House to putting together an estimate of what it would cost for us to terminate this agreement to proceed with the Deh Cho Bridge. A few days have now passed. I’d like to know where we’re at on that evaluation on what it would cost to terminate this agreement.

Mr. Chair, I can’t support it, not when we’re looking for 135 million ways to save money. I can’t support $540,000 for a fence, but I will vote when the time comes.

Mr. Speaker, today I would like to recognize my constituent Mr. Tyler Hawkins of Hay River for his outstanding talent achievements in the music world.

Tyler Hawkins began his music lessons on multi-stringed guitar when he was just eight years old. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from York University with Honours in Performance in 1990. Since then he has been working as a teacher and a private guitar instructor in the Northwest Territories.

This weekend we’ll see another dream realized, as through Tyler’s leadership, we will host what I hope is just the first N.W.T. International Lute...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The report or response to the interim appropriation report was read into the record earlier today, into these proceedings. Just to speak to those issues in a little bit more detail.

This is an unusual budgeting year because of the Territorial election. It throws us off our normal schedule and thus the need for an interim appropriation. I think the interim appropriation from an O&M point of view can be fairly well characterized as a status quo kind of extension of previous fiscal years’ operations.

I think that where we got into more concentrated discussion was around...

I would like to provide a report from the Standing Committee on Priorities and Planning. It’s a report on the 2008-2009 draft Interim Appropriation.

The Standing Committee on Priorities and Planning met to review the draft 2008-2009 interim appropriation between January 14 and 23, 2008. The draft interim appropriation included operations expenditures needed for the first quarter of the 2008-2009 fiscal year as well as a preliminary infrastructure acquisition plan. The operations expenditures are based on the 2007-2008 main estimates and do not include any new initiatives or reductions.

The...