Michael McLeod

That again is a difficult commitment to make. We do provide the information to communities, and on many occasions the communities have taken the opportunity to piggyback their initiatives along with what is happening on the highway alongside the community. We’ve had good discussions with some of the communities already about chipsealing and other types of road servicing. We have provided the same courtesy to the community of Fort Resolution and they have taken advantage of it and plan to do some chipsealing in their community. We do provide advice, and technical staff are made available so...

That’s a difficult question as there is a considerable amount of work and investments that are required on Highway No. 6. We only have one year left in our term and that’s basically all I can commit to.

The work should continue. We have a plan. We have the resources identified that will be required. It will be roughly around $15 million to complete all of Highway No. 6 and, of course, that will be proceeding as money is available as the next government comes forward and budgets are identified. There is a lot of work that has been done already that will be used as a basis, the engineering and...

Mr. Speaker, the intention was to have the agreement to allow for a monthly payment during the construction season where we work with the community. They have an office set up to provide us support and to provide us all kinds of responsibilities that help us move forward, including having a presence in the community. Once the contract is done, we would move forward into the new fiscal year with the agreement kicking in with the Opportunities Fund for the remaining 35 years. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There are a number of reasons that we felt it was necessary to sign off on a couple of agreements. The first was a letter agreement and also the opportunities agreement that the Member is raising. Of course, one of the biggest reasons was to ensure that we could continue to work with the community and also apply resources so that the community can stay involved.

It was quite obvious through our discussions with the community that they wanted to continue to be involved with this project right to the end. They wanted to be able to derive benefits from it. As a government...

As with all our projects and the contracts that are out there, we work quite hard to ensure that the community leaders are informed and aware of our plans. We try to get out prior to the contracts being let, to ensure that happens. There’s also that information provided to the labour force and also the contractors in the area and surrounding communities.

We want to continue to work with the successful contractors to ensure that process happens, and that the maximum amount of business opportunities and labour opportunities are provided to the community. Our staff will continue to do that. It has...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. That would be on a five-year basis, yes. That would be a portion of the Mackenzie Valley Highway and other projects.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’m not sure if we are in a position today to provide an actual percentage of what we are needing in terms of our infrastructure needs. If we looked at it in terms of our five-year needs for all of the government across all of the departments, our needs would probably total up to about $2.5 billion.

That is our goal, as a government, to reduce the deficit on deferred maintenance. We have done quite well over the last few years and this is as a result of having a very good capital budget across the departments and replacing a lot of the infrastructure that was very old and could not be upgraded. We’ve also done a lot of upgrades to buildings that needed it and we were able to address it. But there is still a fairly large deficit budget in the area of deferred maintenance, and I think that every government that comes on stream is going to have to tackle this issue and it will be around for...

Mr. Chairman, the question is not in relationship to the capital and it’s not reflected in this plan. However, we are looking at going out for a new DCN contract very shortly and we’re also looking at ways to increase our bandwidth. That, of course, will allow for more medical traffic in records. We are investing in this budget in server hardware and looking at network infrastructure and data storage infrastructure, and that will help to integrate some of the systems. There’s a budget of $1.2 million to deal with those changes, those improvements.

Yes, Mr. Chairman, I’d like to bring in witnesses.