Michael McLeod

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

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Today I have with me Mr. Russell Neudorf, the deputy minister of Transportation.

The communities in the Sahtu have voiced a lot of concern about safety issues and great improvements to this road for quite a while and there has been attention paid. We have been investing some dollars over the last at least dozen years to improve the road system and I think we are starting to see the results of that.

There have been a lot of bridges built. We have committed and have embarked on putting up signs. There is going to be roughly 98 to 100 signs that will be placed at five-kilometre intervals between Wrigley and Fort Good Hope. There will be over 400 signs, warning signs, over 150...

We’ll certainly keep that in mind. Every Member has raised issues that are hot item topics, and looking at our five-year needs, if we were to try and accommodate all of the projects and all of the needs that are out in the Territories -- there are many -- we’d probably need about a $2 billion budget for five years. But, Mr. Chairman, we’re anticipating we’re going to continue to talk to the federal government to reinforce the need that we have in our infrastructure and encourage them to invest in the Northwest Territories. Thank you.

The information the Member is referring to is information we are obligated to provide to committee as per the Bridge Act, where we have to provide a statement of funding sources and costs based on traffic volumes for that year. At this point, of course, everybody knows we’re not collecting tolls, so this is for information purposes only. Last year, if the information that was provided to committee showed that there were 4,000 trucks that crossed the bridge we had anticipated, we would have seen a small deficit. However, we know that’s not going to be the case. This coming year the traffic...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I take it we are back to airports. Mr. Chairman, the Member referenced dollars that we don’t know about. All the dollars that we know about, he knows about. We are trying to be very open and up front with the information.

Mr. Chairman, we have done a number of airport projects in the Member’s riding. In Fort Good Hope the work that was embarked on in that community for the airport is done. We also completed the airport expansion in Tulita. We are about halfway through Colville Lake. We don’t have any dollars identified in this budget for Deline. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. That will be a little difficult to tie our government for a multi-year investment plan. However, we certainly can commit to developing our engineering study and using that as a guide for future investment. It will certainly identify the areas that need to be placed as priority and attention that needs to be put on those areas. We will develop a multi-year work plan for that piece of highway, or the whole section of this highway; however, the funding will remain in the hands of each government as we progress. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, that is a hypothetical question at this point. We don’t anticipate that there is going to be any delay in the construction schedule. Right now there are 100 trainloads of steel coming from the south and will be unloaded on site. We expect to have a superstructure in by March. Thank you.

Mr. Chair, I probably would have to ask the Member to provide the information as to what he is specifically talking about. We do reuse some of the product that we buy from road services. We use them in a different fashion, however. We don’t mill it back up and put it in form of chipseal, but we use it as fill. I am not aware of any other recyclable way to do it. I am not aware of the situation that the Member is referring to. Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, the engineering study is not completed as of yet and we hope that will be done fairly quickly. We had a budget of $5 million to do reconstruction and, of course, as the Member is aware, a lot of the money that we spent for this year has gone to repairs of areas that are really challenging us. There are some areas where we’ve had the road fail on us and ditches that are needing replacement that we did not anticipate. So about three-quarters of the $5 million has been spent. We have in the budget $4 million for next year.