Katrina Nokleby

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?

Thank you, Madam Chair. Those are good questions and, obviously, something that we're going to have to be dealing with over the next while. I do want to say that some of the federal funding that's coming forward now, they are, as I mentioned before, looking to be more flexible. We are looking to get 100 percent dollars for projects going forward so, perhaps, that may be a route we can go with the three major infrastructure projects. Those would be options that we would be looking to discuss with the federal government. The conversation I'm having with the federal government is that, not only...

Thank you, Madam Chair. As part of that project matrix that I was talking about earlier, all the highways are included in that. Yes, we do look at ranking them and determining which ones need repair and rehabilitation sooner rather than later. We can definitely commit to looking at the particular areas that you are looking at. We do have a published highways report that could be, if the Member wants more information you can access that. I'm definitely willing to take those suggestions back and we can look at where those pieces of infrastructure fall into the planning for the department and...

Thank you, Madam Chair. We commit to doing so. Thank you.

On everyone's left, that's Dr. Joe Dragon, and on the right is Mr. Gary Brennan. Thank you.