Madam Chair, there was a fundamental decision to be made and we have made it. That decision is this: Do we tie ourselves in knots in the midst of a project, that we are working desperately to conclude, with lawyers and litigation and all these other issues, or do we rise above that and look at what the end goal is here and what is in the best interest of the people of the Northwest Territories, which is get the bridge built, limit the further costs and get it done within this current building season.

There will be plenty of time for review. There will be plenty of time later for finger pointing...

The contractor in the contract is responsible. There has been, clearly, slippage. The reality we are faced with is the contractor was unable to conclude the work in the time that was predicted and agreed to. We are here today 90 percent complete, literally a few months from the end of this project to get it done. As has been committed to once the project is done, there will be the full review and debrief as to what happened so that we can learn all of the things we need to learn and going forward. Thank you.

Madam Chair, we’d be happy to give the information. We can verbalize some of it here, but we also have the complete deck that was shared with committee, which we would be more than happy to make sure the Member, in fact, has a copy so he is conversant with all the issues. But I’ll ask, as well, Madam Chair, with your indulgence, for Mr. Neudorf to walk through some of the key areas of investment. Thank you.

I well remember the discussions when we had this very similar debate. The Member might have been involved, as well, when we were talking about moving Health out of Inuvik to give the economy to the people in the Sahtu. I think that process is underway. We have commitments on decentralization. We are looking at how we do this, and going forward I think I know we will get there, but I’ll ask Minister Ramsay if he wants to speak to the issue so we can give the Member some comfort from the Minister himself. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I will quickly give a response. The Member for Frame Lake indicated that the government gets to spend what they want and MLAs are told we have no money to spend and, I would, just for the record, make it clear that we spend what the Legislature votes us to spend. It is a collective budget of this body here, this august body that we are now before.

The Member also commented that a major concern is that we don’t have a lot of new money to spend. As you look around at the landscape around us, pick a province or another country where there’s layoffs, freezes, rollbacks...

When I say “we” the government, it was done through the very capable people in Finance negotiating with Finance Canada. It went through all the due processes with Cabinet and FMB. There were, and I recollect sitting at a number of briefings with committee about the borrowing limit, about what was underway, how things were going, what we were looking at. We’ve also had a number of briefings on the Opportunities Fund and I’m sure we could fill shoeboxes with paper of all that work that was done. That was the deal. The bottom line was the federal government was not prepared to offer us an offset...

Yes, Mr. Chairman.

Madam Chair, it may sound more authoritative if Mr. Kalgutkar says it.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. The red tape initiative is going to have two focuses. One focus is going to be, of course, internal within government, and to look for those types of improvements that will speed up processes, in terms of paper, steps required, things that maybe haven’t been reviewed in many years. The one where we think there’s an opportunity to do good work is, as the Premier indicated, we’ve consistently been ranked very low by the Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses, for example, in terms of the red tape. We think some of that is tied into the federal government, but we want...

Thank you, Madam Chair. The loan was public. It was very topical and extensively covered in the newspaper. The loan was repaid in full early and I indicated what the interest rate was. I don’t know. I’ll ask Mr. Kalgutkar. I don’t think we have that detail. So we don’t have that detail on that particular loan here. It’s been wrapped up and paid off for some time, but that information is available and I agree to provide it to committee if that’s their wish. Thank you.