Michael McLeod

We’ve made a number of commitments in this House to provide information and briefings. We will continue to honour that. Once we get all the pieces of this project confirmed and the plans laid out, we will commit to doing that. Thank you.

The Members have requested that we provide more information to the public and the Members have requested that we have better communication. We’re trying to do that. We have informed the Members that we would do a technical briefing. We have worked hard to get it prepared. The information will be provided by our officials, including the deputy ministers. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, there is some suggestion in that comment. However, Mr. Speaker, we’ve given the information to the Member already. He has it. We could give it to him again. It’s the same briefing we provided to the Members yesterday. Thank you.

I can see the cause for concern. If it is an issue that has been caused by ourselves as a department and we can find out what the root of it is, we will certainly try to make amends so that people are not burdened by something that is not their fault.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We’ve responded to a lot of different concerns that have been brought forward from the Members of this House, including licence plates and issuing of registration and having more transportation officers on the highways. This is not an issue that has been brought to my attention. This is the first I’m hearing of it. As far as I know, there has been no change to the quality or type of stickers that we’re using. I’d certainly have to follow up on that. It’s not an issue that I was aware of.

We are planning to introduce new licence plates sometime this summer. They are pretty impressive, from what I’ve seen. I’m not aware that we have changed our type of stickers. It’s an issue that will be of concern, of course, as we are going to be issuing new licence plates starting this summer. I will certainly commit to the Member that we will follow it up and see what the concern is, if that’s the case with a lot of people, if that is coming back to us. I personally have not had any problems, but having said that, we’ll follow up with the concern.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, it’s good to see the visitors in the gallery all wearing green. Today I wanted to recognize my sister-in-law Melody, and my little bundle of joy up there that can’t sit still and I don’t think is really interested in what we’re saying, Cooper McLeod. Welcome.

There’s a P3 arrangement in this case and, yes, there are responsibilities assigned to different partners. In this case, we did charge back a lot of what the government has to have incurred, including all the different components of responsibility, but the two people that we have assigned are a position and a half that we have assigned directly to this position. We have not included and we did not agree anywhere in the concession agreement that we would charge it back. That’s the rationale for why we’re doing it the way we are. Thank you.

Thank you. I suppose we could calculate that. That’s not something we normally do on our project is divide a person’s time up into how many projects he’s got and assign a cost to those specific projects. This is a normal course of duty. We can certainly try to get some calculations together. It would entail some effort. We have a lot of people that may have worked on one portion or another on this project, but we can certainly have a discussion to see if we can get that together in a fairly short order, if that’s what’s being requested. Thank you.

Thank you. During the discussion of Committee of the Whole we had made a number of commitments. We certainly committed that we would continue to demonstrate that there is competent management on this project. We would provide clarity and timely information on where the project is at and we will also provide clarity and information on our role as a government and all our trades and people that are involved so that the public knows exactly where this project is at in terms of the timelines and so they will be fully informed. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.