Without taking the thunder away from the federal Minister’s visit, I can assure the Member that we have been working on completing the PDR for all of the Mackenzie Valley Highway. We had anticipated it would take roughly two years and cost approximately $8 million. The work that has been completed from the Inuvik-Tuk portion is proving to be a little more expedient than we had expected. They did the work on that stretch in roughly a six or seven month period. We expect that we’ll move a little faster than we had originally provided time for. But we’ll be having a get-together and some...

Mr. Speaker, we’ve been putting a lot of attention to this initiative that has been supported by our government. We’ve done some very good work in terms of developing the project description reports that are required for the road all the way from Wrigley to Tuk. The federal government has, through the CanNor program, funded the portion from Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk. My discussions with the mayors from Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk indicate that has now been concluded. It is being packaged as a report and that is coming forward. There has also been a submission for some dollars and a request for...

Mr. Speaker, I am not sure if that was something that we had indicated in our response to the Member at the time. I believe we had discussed the merits of the program. I had raised that there were some NGOs that were raising concern and that we needed to further investigate. That is where the situation still stands, from my standpoint. I would have to have further discussions. We will provide correspondence to the Member. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, we expect to have a contractor in place. There are a number of contractors that have come forward. There are some serious negotiations. We have some preliminary numbers that we are looking at for the Bridge Corporation and ourselves are looking at. We are quite confident that we are going to resolve that and have an agreement by some time later early in this new year. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, there are a number of unknowns in this project, as we speak. The Bridge Corporation is negotiating with a contractor about price until sometime later on this month. It will continue to be ongoing until we have an agreement in place.

Of course, there may be termination fees that more than likely will come forward from the contractor that the Bridge Corporation couldn’t make a positive agreement with that we will probably have to deal with. There are still some outstanding claims that we don’t have the numbers on. Mr. Speaker, our goal is to include all of the issues that I mentioned...

We feel that the bridge will be constructed with the price that we had indicated earlier and we are trying to stay on budget. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, the gong show the Member speaks of is only in some people’s eyes. I am very interested to see why he’s concerned about my being positive on this project would be a concern.

Mr. Speaker, this project was brought forward with a design in place with a caveat that further testing had to be done. That was done and approved. There needed to be some changes. The designer of the original bridge was no longer in place and a new team came into place and indicated that there could be some changes made that would result in savings and we proceeded on that basis. Things...

Yes, Mr. Speaker, as I indicated earlier in my response, we have inserted our staff and we are participating in all aspects of discussions on this project. Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, we have taken more of a hands-on approach through our resources and have people involved with all the different activities that are taking place, all the different discussions and those negotiations. As we develop and move forward on settling and coming to a final price on this project, we incorporated some requirements that needed to be addressed, including rolling in the cost of some of the claims and including the termination fees as we move forward. We would like to have all the different loose ends tied up and be able to come forward with some confidence to the Members and...

The Member knows full well that we don’t have that information at this time. We would expect the cost, any kind of termination fees would include work that was done up to this date on this portion and this phase of the contract and some profit margins also. Thank you.