Rylund Johnson

Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair. You know, it's obviously in everyone's interest to spend this tens of millions of dollars, I think. We've heard the feds say, you know, well we don't need to give you more community infrastructure money, you're not spending the money we gave you. And I've heard MACA say similarly well, we don't need to increase the community infrastructure budget, there's tens of millions of dollars not being spent. I think we all know if this was just unconditional money to spend on infrastructure, they'd get it done. But sometimes the ICIP project categories were rather specific...

Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair. I guess my concern is the way I understand this to work is the feds essentially gave us $66 million, they said, get your communities to apply and then you will help decide which ones go forward, not all of the projects communities wanted to do obviously made the first round of cuts and now there are some that, you know, inflation is causing some community needs to reapply or find other money or not go ahead so that money is not available for another community to kind of fill in the gap. That's my understanding of the current situation. So I guess the solution...

Thank you, Madam Chair. This is $29 million being carried over although we are holding approximately $66 million, and I believe there's actually quite a bit more through some other ICIP funding for municipalities. I believe all of this money has been allocated. It's project specific so a community worked with us to apply to the feds and we'll build X thing. But my understanding is, and we got - we weren't going to get all that money out so we asked the feds for an extension, they gave us an extension, but my understanding is that quite a bit of these allocated projects are now at the state...

Thank you. That was very helpful in helping me understand why I have $54 million and we have $2.7 million. I appreciate that. I guess what this also leads me into is, is there any hope of publishing some sort of capital plan? You know, I know we have a capital acquisition plan, I know we have a capital needs assessment that goes, I believe, ten years, maybe even 30 years. I know the Department of Infrastructure has another plan with deferred maintenance and things in it. But there's nowhere I can look to kind of see what the GNWT has in the lineup and what it's planning to build. You have to...

Yeah. Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair. Maybe I had a different number in my head. I guess, sorry, can I clarify, then, would that - that's the first time I heard that number. Would that be, like, a licensing fee? Has something changed in the sense that it would be $370,000 annually or, yeah, can I just get some more context. Is that total, we get some custom designed software and we own it kind of thing? Thank you.

Yeah, I - well, I guess, how many projects did we lapse and can we table it in the House or report this somewhere publicly or if not, then read it out. However it gets out publicly. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. This is our famous MARS, Mineral Administration Registry System. And I believe, you know, this is required to get us into online map staking. I believe to do that we got to implement the Mineral Resources Act and get the regs done. We've carried this over a number of times. Can we just have a realistic timeline of when we would actually buy the software and have online map staking in place? Thank you.

Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair. I share some of my colleague from Frame Lake's frustrations. I think one of the issues is that the capital estimates and the supplementary estimates are, you know, financial documents created for public accounting purposes and they're really bad documents to try and figure out what is going on with our construction projects. I think an ideal system would be some sort of portal that would list all of the things we're building, when it was tendered, when it's being carried over, perhaps a reason why it's got delayed and ultimately showing when something is...

That's pretty good. That's a pretty quick turnaround. I will be genuinely surprised if we complete this on time and on budget in 2026, whatever that budget may end up ultimately being.

I guess back to my previous point, I could do this for every single capital project you know, is there federal money, when is it starting construction, when is it completing construction, what are you doing with the initial assessment, how is it being procured, how much is the total budget - I've never gotten an answer to that one but, you know, one day hopefully.

I would encourage the GNWT, before it comes and...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am very happy to hear that, and I'm sure all of the people moving in tomorrow are even happier. Great news.

I guess my question, in a bit more serious tone though, is that this has taken a couple of years. We still haven't, on the public record, figured out exactly what happened. I know there were some contractor disputes. There were some inspection issues. But do we have a figure now about what all of this cost us in extra dollars? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.