Tom Beaulieu

The tenders on that have closed. We’re going to award soon. It’s going in on the winter road and we’re going to do the construction as soon as possible after that.

The construction of the highway was finished in 2006 and we don’t have the information if any warranty money was used the following year with us here. It may have been, but we can provide that information to committee if the Members wish.

The brushing is something that we are doing under the separate contract from the Building Canada Plan. The Building Canada Plan will be the reconstruction of the Dempster Highway, Highway No. 8, and the brushing is the separate contract. We are trying to do it every couple of years if possible. There’s a lot of highway to be brushed and I’m noticing that most of the highways now are getting some brushing done. For safety reasons we want to continue to do, right away, brushing as much as possible. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We do have equipment strategically placed at James Creek, McPherson and we’re trying to, when there’s bad weather and the highway’s blowing, get it open as quickly as possible. We’re not thinking that adding more pieces of equipment will keep the road open. Often the road is closed on the Yukon side. So we don’t think it’s really a lack of equipment, rather just conditions of weather on the Dempster.

Problems with chipseal are not due to the actual chipseal itself; it’s due to what’s underneath. What we intend to do with the Inuvik airport road is to rebuild sections where there are issues. However, we are also open to trying other products that do work better. If we find that there’s a product that works better almost under any condition, then we would look at that, but the plan now is to rebuild the road, strengthen it and chipseal.

Mr. Chairman, we have no plans to extend the runway in Hay River. Most of the aircraft that are landing there are much smaller than what the airport can handle. You can land 737s at the Hay River Airport, so there is no plan to extend that airport runway at this time.

The entire highway would have been under warranty for one year, so as we pay the contractor for reconstructing the highway, it would have been a holdback for a year and then if the highway held for a year, we couldn’t legally hold a contractor’s money any longer than the year’s warranty. So once that money was released, essentially it was up to us to maintain any issues on the highway after that.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I do.

I just have to clear something up here, $4.5 million carried over at the end of the last fiscal year. We had $90 million appropriated for this fiscal year that we’re in and that’s a factor as well. We’re, in this fiscal year, spending the money right now. So I just don’t want to leave that out completely and we didn’t just go from $4.5 and then jump to the $30 million that we’re trying to get now into the House, but there’s the advance, as the Members know, so that last year’s budget was, or this current year’s budget was $90 million.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The plan is to improve the airport road with the Building Canada Fund. We have that particular project in the second bundle that has gone to the federal government. We’re anticipating that we will have some report back from the government, well, approval back from the federal government early in 2016.