Katrina Nokleby

I have to apologize. I am missing a section in my binder. I don't have page 226. I wonder if I have two 226s. Sorry. My apologies. Okay. Two-twenty-eight is my next number, Joe. Thank you. If the committee would give me a second, I am going to pull up my e-binder. I apologize. If that would be okay?

Thank you, Madam Chair. I do not have the breakdown of Indigenous, but I do believe that Dr. Dragon does, so I will pass that over to him. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I would like to thank the Member for his questions. The Department of Infrastructure is continuing with our capital plan. We have had to have a bit of delay in our process to account for COVID, including the lack or want of southern or outside workers in small communities. This has delayed the implementation of some of our contracting at this point.

However, the Department of Infrastructure does plan to continue with most of our infrastructure projects going forward that we already had on the books. We have started to tweak and look at our procurement strategy. We have...

Thank you, Madam Chair. In that one, we had an increase of $345,000, and that was the Northern Transportation Adaptation Initiative. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Yes, this is the area for Arctic Energy Alliance. It was part of the priority to give them more funding. I am going to pass it over to Dr. Dragon for the more detailed explanation. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I will ask Dr. Dragon to answer that. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Actually, many of these projects are actually lots of different, smaller projects together. For example, Mackenzie Valley Highway, we have already done the Canyon Creek portion of that highway. We will be looking to do Prohibition Creek next. We are breaking away bite-sized pieces of those overall, large projects. When you get to the comments of shovel-ready, well, there are actually, in fact, several shovel-ready small projects that go along or work for consultants or work for contractors, things like that that are the drivers in keeping a lot of people in our economy...

I think the Member makes really good points, all things that I have considered. I am in one of the engineering companies that does not have the people to bid on something. Another part that we see often is, as stated, the downturn in Alberta occurred. We had a lot of people who started to buy work in the North. That is a problem, and that is again, I guess, back to the negotiated contract versus the RFP-type conversation, because I cannot go out and tell a company not to lower their rates of their employees to win a job. So I understand that that has to now be coming back into the RFP and how...

We will commit to taking this away and getting more details for the Member. Thank you.

I think that's pretty much all the department has been doing for the last while, is adjusting all of our programs, our projects, everything with respect to COVID. It's just unfortunately, with the way that the system of the budgeting goes in, this is my understanding, was we have to get the budget in. It was done prior to COVID, and then there will be adjustments coming. Maybe, Dr. Dragon, I don't know if you have any significant adjustments that you might want to discuss at this point?