Michael McLeod

Thank you. I’m glad the Member pointed out risks. Mr. Speaker, this is the risk of asking for an Auditor General operational audit a few days after we assume the project completely in the responsibility of the government. The Auditor General did a lot of this work as we were putting our team together, as we were putting our plans together, and this document reflects that, Mr. Speaker. It’s unfortunate. Our preference would have been to have the final audit at the end of the project. I stated many times before that it’s really stretched our resources. We’ve been audited for eight months out of...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We’ve put together a team of experts from across the country, I should say across the world, that are very experienced, probably the best in their field and they’ve put together a risk matrix that identifies all the potential challenges that are out there. Anything that may happen, they develop an action plan that would require a response and this is the area that the Auditor General has flagged as having some concern.

Mr. Speaker, we should, I guess, put into perspective first of all what risk means to the Auditor General and everybody else, the ordinary person on the...

Thank you. I can assure the Member that the $15 million requirement is in the needs assessment, the five-year needs assessment. It will be the decision of the next government to ensure that these dollars are indentified and invested into that stretch of road. I can’t commit that that’s going to happen, but as I pointed out to the Member, that’s what it’s going to need and we are aware of that and that’s what we’ve put in our transition documents. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I commend the Member for raising the issue on a consistent basis to bring attention to the need for improvement to our infrastructure, and in particular Highway No. 6. We have been working very hard with the Member and the Member’s community to move the project forward. We’ve done a lot of work on Highway No. 6. It needed a lot of work to ensure that the preservation of the road was intact.

We have been working and focusing on the area from Buffalo River to the community of Fort Resolution. We had identified a little over $7 million to do the work on that section of road...

Mr. Speaker, we do have a design sign-off on all components of the bridge project. As I indicated yesterday, we have also had our own independent design engineers, our experts, review the design. They all approve it. What the Auditor General is looking for is one signature to approve all components. Right now we have a designer that approved the piers and we have a designer that approved the superstructure. Although the superstructure is 85 percent of the overall design, her desire is to have us have one designer approve all the different components and that would bring comfort. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Yes, we have the figures. The Auditor General reviews and audits the bridge project on an annual basis. They have been since the project started. They also have the information. Thank you.

Yes, I would, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Speaker, if there was any potential loss of revenue due to the contract going past the completion date, we would seek recovery on that. Thank you.

The Auditor General identified the risk matrix as being weak. It didn’t cover some areas that we consider as low. There’s also been concern from the Auditor General that the wording itself was too general when we used the best efforts or best practices and those types of terms, she figured that we should have it word-specific to an actual response, Mr. Speaker.

We have a contract, we have a plan to deal with any issues that come forward and there may be issues that are unforeseen, but for the most part, Mr. Speaker, we’ve engaged risk management experts to put this plan together, they’re the...

Certainly, Mr. Speaker, it’s our practice to work with communities and in some cases we’ve been able to combine efforts and lower the cost of chipsealing. In some cases we’ve actually stepped in and provided some of the technical expertise that the community was lacking. We’d certainly want to sit down well in advance of this project moving forward, to have that discussion and see if there’s any way that the community can take advantage of the work that’s being done in the area. Thank you.