Statements in Debates
Thank you. Is there any federal money for this type of thing? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The last few months of a session are a series of mixed emotions. Projects you've been yelling about for years all of a sudden finish and you find yourself sighing in relief but also wondering why was that so hard? And then, Mr. Speaker, projects that you were really hoping would get done, well it turns out they're not going to get done and another Assembly will have to yell about them for more years. And, Mr. Speaker, there's one project above all that I would like to see completed before I leave this session, not removing Walmart from BIP or opening the DMV on Saturday...
Thank you, Madam Chair. I had a few questions about the previous line item. I guess the $1.6 million for the Fort Smith Territorial Fire Centre, I believe this is the first time that the Legislative Assembly is approving any money for this project, which is exciting news. I remember we all went and got a tour of the old fire centre but I guess I just have some basic questions. Do we have a cost estimate of what a new territorial fire centre will cost us? Thank you.
Yeah, thank you, Madam Chair. I guess would we be able to get a list of the projects that are currently in the queue here? Thank you.
Yeah, thank you. I guess I want to clarify whether - when this $29 million is carried over, whether there's any review by the GNWT of the project or is it simply we didn't get it out the door to give it to the communities so it automatically gets carried over, or do they have to come to us and say hey, sorry, this is what's happening, can you please carry over our funding? Is there any sort of accountability or oversight by us on it or is it an automatic carryover once we don't send it to them? Thank you.
Yeah, I guess, is there any willingness - you know, I guess - to me, you could publish capital needs assessment and it doesn't mean that you're going to build the things and then we know that our capital needs assessment is billions more dollars than we could ever hope to have. But it would be nice to publicly actually say that, to say that we have $3 billion in needs and we're spending $250 million. Is there any hope of the needs assessment actually being published? Thank you.
Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I would, yeah, like that to committee, of the total cost. My understanding was it was going to cost millions of dollars to build this software and then probably some licensing fees ongoing after that. And some of that, you know, I know is found in capital and some in operations so I was under a different understanding. But I think if committee could get a general update on what's going on here, this is one of those - there's a lot of people. We're the last jurisdiction left in Canada without online map staking. It would be really nice to have a firm deadline. I get it...
Thank you. Yeah, it's tough. I guess the ones that I would have - can I get some explanation, perhaps generally, about why we're lapsing things? Sometimes I understand we have to lapse millions of dollars because it doesn't meet the category for a carryover, but the actual project will go forward. We just didn't get the contract in place so it didn't meet FMB approval and it will get back on the list. And sometimes my understanding is we go out for tender on something, it shows up over budget, and we lapse it and it falls off the capital plan. We are no longer ever going ahead with that...
Yeah, you know, we already approved previously a list of a bunch of software that we've carried over many times. I guess I'm very skeptical about this one getting also procured in this fiscal year. I think it's a safe bet to see it would be carried over one more time. I get you have to have the money before you go out to tender so maybe we'll squeak in at the end of this fiscal.
I guess can we get a - there's $175,000 here. Can we get an estimate of what the total cost for this would be? I believe at one point we were looking for something a little off the shelf and then we figured out well, it...
Thank you, Madam Chair. Yeah, and I do think that the Department of Finance prepares a briefing note for every single one of these line items that they share in confidence and it doesn't exist publicly, I think a lot of that information would probably save a lot of frustration of us asking the questions to just bring out basic facts on the record. But since we don't have that, I will ask some of those basic facts throughout.
Beginning with I have a different calculation of how much money we lapsed. It was quite a lot more than $2.7 million. But I guess I'll start with can someone tell me what...