Tom Beaulieu

Mr. Speaker, I wish to provide additional information to supplement my responses given during oral question period on September 29, 2015, regarding dredging the port of Hay River. The Department of Transportation has received a response from Fisheries and Oceans Canada to our most recent letter requesting dredging and federal marine facility maintenance.

The Government of the Northwest Territories is keenly aware of the critical need to restore the east channel of the Hay River and its approaches from Great Slave Lake back to safe marine navigating conditions.

The Department of Transportation...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We are going to be meeting and getting the group together. It’s going to be ourselves and industry, obviously. So I can’t determine their schedule, but we’re going to try to have our people ready at any time and definitely before the next barging season. Thank you.

Thank you. There will be two phases in the planning study. The first phase will be completed in February of 2016. Phase two, which will be complete with schematic design and class C estimate and then used for the peer review committee. The peer review committee will be discussing the need, the capital need for the Fort Simpson Health Centre in comparison to all of the other capital needs put forward by all of the departments. We’re expecting the peer review process as part of phase two, the planning study, will be completed by fall of 2016. Thank you.

It’s more an issue of the volume of work. Right now, all of the airport divisions, the airports in the regions all report to a regional superintendent. One of the solutions that the Member at one time proposed was that perhaps the first step would be to move the airport operations in the Sahtu to report to headquarters here in Yellowknife, and we had looked at that. Right now that would be a bit of hybrid from what we’re doing. What we wanted to do was continue to move forward on the Member’s demand to have basically a highways section, a marine section and an airport section all in a regional...

I don’t know specifically which lessons were learned from the very inception of the Deh Cho Bridge, but we do have lessons learned. They are on the website. We have made several presentations. The department of highways and marine division of Department of Transportation made a presentation on the Deh Cho Bridge Lessons Learned. That is on the website. Retrospective Lessons Learned on the Deh Cho Bridge, again prepared by the Department of Transportation, is on our website. The Auditor General’s report is also on the website. We charted out the recommendations of the Auditor General’s report...

Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. I don’t believe I said that the community or the public did not deserve a retrospective analysis. I indicated that we had done some work with the Auditor General in looking at the bridge at the point when we took the bridge over from another project authority and changed the contractor. We also had a report done by independent people, the Levelton Report that was done from the time the bridge started until we took over the bridge, and DOT had done a couple of reports on lessons learned. I felt that that was sufficient for us to move forward using that bridge as lessons...

I can have that discussion with the department again. We felt like there was no real value in continuing to do a retrospective analysis. We are busy. There are a lot of projects on the go, and the department felt that with the retrospective lessons learned and the Deh Cho Bridge lessons learned, the Levelton Report before we took over and the Auditor General’s report at the point we took over were sufficient for us to move forward, was sufficient to provide information.

The Member is correct that doesn’t cover the financial and the political perspective of what occurred with the bridge, and I’m...

We do have that information on our DOT website. We felt that individuals who wish to determine what the issues were could find that information in a lot of different places. We looked at a retrospective analysis as a tool for ourselves when we move forward. It appeared that the main issues that people in the House felt that there was something wrong with the Deh Cho Bridge. What we were saying is the issue was that the contractor changed midstream, that the project authority changed in midstream. That is what seemed to be the issue.

As far as the department goes, we felt we did a very good job...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I don’t have the information here in the House with me on how far along the department is in producing a discussion paper for the Assembly. I will talk to Public Works today to find out if I can get an update for the Members in the House and provide that early next week. Thank you.

There is no indication there are any health concerns on the application of EK-35 on our runways.