Michael McLeod

Mr. Chairman, the issue of infrastructure deficit and deferred maintenance is of concern right across Canada. We’ve worked with a number of jurisdictions to try to bring that to the attention of the federal government. Within our own budgets and our own initiatives, we’ve targeted deferred maintenance as a priority. Over the last few years we’ve managed to bring that number down by $145 million from a huge challenge with the infrastructure deficit. We’ll continue to do so over the next while. We have targeted some dollars for this coming year and we would expect the next governments to do the...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. With me to my right is Mr. Paul Guy, the deputy minister of Public Works and Services; and I also have on my left Laurie Gault, director of Technology Service Centre.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, it’s good to see so many people in the House today. I would like to welcome everybody. I want to welcome some of my constituents: Clara Sabourin from Hay River Reserve. It’s good to see her here. Thank you for coming. We also have, from my home town, Jessica Field, who has come to join us today. Thank you. And an old friend of mine, Jim Allard. Good to see you here, Jim. And of course, we can’t have enough McLeod’s in the House, so I’d like to welcome Karen here with us. Thank you for coming also.

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, this has been an issue that’s been raised on a number of occasions by the MLA for that constituency. It has also been raised by the chiefs and a number of the leadership, concerns over the amount of gravel that’s being used. We’ve agreed that we need to deal with this issue. It’s part of the process that we’ve embarked on to renew our licence. In 2002 the study was done and it showed that there’s really no issue on the amount of gravel that was being used, however, we want to be able to give comfort to the people who live in that area. We’re looking at alternate methods; maybe...

Mr. Chairman, the Main Street Dust Control Program was a program initiated by MACA. It was funded by MACA and the Department of Transportation provided the support and technical information and we continue to do a lot of the same kind of work that we did with that program, even though that program has sunsetted. We are in communication with several communities. We are talking to the community of Fort McPherson in the Member’s riding. We are also providing support to the community of Fort Providence, which is chipsealing all their roads next year. We’re also going to be communicating with the...

The Member is quite correct; there have been some serious challenges starting to show up in a number of our transportation infrastructure across the North on our highways and including on our airports where we see some slumping. We are looking at different ways of construction to mitigate these challenges, however, it’s an issue that is going to be ongoing. We have tried different ways to hardtop the airports. We have tried chipseal in some cases. We’ve tried EK35. There is some new technology that we have had discussions with proponents on but have not done any testing on at this point on our...

I apologize; I forgot the question. That amount is identified for investment in some finishing gravel and also royalties for the gravel. Thanks.