Michael McLeod

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Yes, we are covering 100 percent of the costs to upgrade the house to bring it to a standard where they can move back into the units. We are also ensuring that the houses are now at the 100 year high water mark. These people that own these houses did not have any other avenue. They lacked the resources to address the situation. I suppose we could have let them go and leave these houses contaminated. They would have been written off, but that didn’t change the situation, so we decided to pay for 100 percent of the cost of bringing these houses up to a standard where...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I will commit to having that discussion with the municipalities. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, the question was raised by the Member. We are planning to have that discussion with the NWT Association of Communities. There has been no formal request to have this reform take place as of yet, and we will do follow-up once that discussion takes place if there is a desire from that association to move forward on it. Thank you.

So the authorization came from the Minister, he states. So I'd like to know, who gave the Minister his direction. Did he consult with the regions? I think that to say the decision came from him, I'd like to ask, then, who did the Minister get his direction from? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, in order for us to, as a government, consider a gravel stockpile and to bring in equipment or to contract that out, we need to have specific projects. I recognize the Member’s need to work towards building a road system to the source of gravel. It is a problem for the community of Tuktoyaktuk. We recognize that. There has been a large request for a large contribution from the community that we have considered. We are not able to accommodate it. We have continued to realize that there is a need for a reliable source. However, in order to have a...

Mr. Speaker, the gravel revolving stockpile fund was wound down in 1999. Investment for gravel requirements have been built into the municipal community government budgets. In the case of Tuktoyaktuk, there are no specific projects that we can point to at this point. I don’t have any listed that require gravel. We don’t have any plans to bring any stockpile into that community either from the Department of Transportation or from MACA. Having said that, there is a need across the Territories for assistance to look at the issue of gravel. We are working with other departments to put...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, there has been ongoing growth in private and commercial vehicle use due to resource development. The climate is warming and bringing more precipitation and more variable weather patterns. Our transportation infrastructure is aging. The severity of each of these factors is expected to increase into the future. These factors are forcing the department to increase the operation and maintenance efforts.

Mr. Speaker in the past, the department’s own maintenance forces worked a standard 40-hour week, Monday through Friday. Maintenance requirements occurring in...

Mr. Chair, I guess to answer the first question about whether this money is enough to clean up the site, no. The Finance Minister has indicated there is more to do. We are not exactly sure the extent of the contamination. The swimming pool was built on a fuel storage site that was owned by the government. We are not sure if it was our government or the federal government. We are looking into that at this point. It may be significant; we don’t know. The winter weather didn’t allow us to explore far enough to see how badly the contamination was, but it is a huge area.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, before we can say yes or no, or I respond to the community’s request, we’d have to see a lot more detail. We are quite interested to sit down and talk to communities. Other communities have come forward and demonstrated that there is a cost savings of having some of the money fast-tracked into a one-year period where we would save on the mobilizations cost and also the demobilization. So we’d be very interested to sit down with them. Whatever we can arrange through a meeting with the community along with the Member, I’d be glad to sit down and have that...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, yes, we’d be interested in sitting down with the community of Nahanni Butte to talk about the proposal for the public access road to the community. It’s something we’re in discussions with in the case of other communities, so we’d, of course, be glad to sit down and discuss this with them also. Thank you.