Michael Miltenberger

Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Transportation looks after and is responsible for the highway system in the Northwest Territories. He is responsible. This Cabinet is responsible for addressing the issues of the Members as they are raised in this House. Specifically, the highway issue and the highway inventory will be addressed by the Minister of Transportation as he comes forward with the business plan for the coming year. As we resolve and finalize and move forward with the borrowing limit issue, it will give us the capacity to address this particular circumstance. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Given the Minister’s intimate knowledge of his department, I’ll defer the question to him.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We do have a plan for the Northwest Territories. It has been articulated since we have picked the Cabinet and since we set our priorities. One of the major objectives in this Assembly, given the fiscal circumstances that we are in, what happened in the last Assembly as we put all of our pre-capital to take advantage of the stimulus money from the federal government and put out a $1.1 billion capital program over three years is to look at our borrowing limit. Our borrowing limit talks are productive. They are going to result in an increased borrowing limit. The reason...

The money, the last year of the $60 million four-year Energy Fund concludes at the end of March. We do not have the replacement funds for that in place at this point. There are a number of programs that were added to the base but there are a lot of sunsets. The challenge going forward coming when we get to May when the borrowing limit is cleared up and we look at what type of infrastructure investments we want to plan for one of the areas, of course in addition to the red flag capital list, is going to be the whole area of energy.

There are two potential options. I could commit to get the information from the Department of Transportation, or Minister Ramsay will be back tomorrow and ready to appear before the House on Friday. Either way, I can commit to get the information. I don’t have the detail that the Member is asking of me today.

Thank you, Madam Chair. The budget before us has money for highway maintenance. It’s not broken out. I don’t have the specific information for the Highway No. 7 maintenance costs. The capital budget has already been passed and we had a discussion today about the plan of the government as we deal with our borrowing limit to enable us to make key strategic infrastructure investments in the coming months.

Yes, Madam Chair.

The Member is in the legislative legends with his song “If I Had a Million Dollars” and if you sign the deal with devolution, you’ll have over $300 million, so I think you should just keep that one in mind as he’s making music.

We will have the discussion about the legislation, the issue about the programs that are best held with the Minister of Health and Social Services. There’s been a democratic vote that’s been taken, a decision has been made by the voters in Norman Wells, and we have acted upon that as we are required to do and obligated to do under our democratic system. If we want to...

If we’re going to in fact make music together, we’ll have to ensure that it’s not a sad song, because I understand from the questions in the House yesterday that the Member has a broken heart as a result of devolution, so we’ll have to be very careful what kind of music we make. As I’ve indicated, I’m more than willing to sit down with the Member and talk the specifics.

That commitment stands for the Member in his constituency as well as all the other Members opposite. We will and are going to do the best job possible with the resources available. We are going to look at making strategic investments. When the Minister of Transportation is back from his travels, he will be able to speak to great detail about the Member’s concerns whether from a broad government point of view. This issue very clearly is on our to-do list, our priority list should extra funds become available, which we anticipate they will in the coming months. Thank you.