Tom Beaulieu

Mr. Speaker, the Government of the Northwest Territories has committed to building a strong, prosperous territory and ensuring its benefits are shared in all communities and regions. Strategic investments in transportation infrastructure will help support the long-term growth of our economy and provide jobs and opportunities to our people. The Inuvik-Tuktoyaktuk highway is one of these projects, and I am pleased to report on the success of the first winter of construction.

The highway is one of the largest construction projects ever undertaken by the GNWT and is significant as the first leg of...

Mr. Speaker, I don’t have the details of that specific contract. I don’t have the details of the change order to that contract, but there are regulations in place, there are holdbacks on all contracts to accommodate any potential issues on the contracts, so those are our standard. They are laid out in the contract. Depending on what the price of the overall contract was, then the holdback would be there. The appropriate amount would be held back to ensure that the work is completed to a standard that’s acceptable. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As a commitment to the House, the department did a retrospective analysis of the bridge and also accepted all of the recommendations of the Auditor General. The specific work that was done in detail, the contract that the Member speaks of, I don’t have that detail here with me and I am not able to speak on that at this time. Thank you.

Thank you. I know that each time the Members had asked for an update on the Deh Cho Bridge, the department has been more than accommodating. We are prepared to do that and we can provide an update, full disclosure of costs, anything that needs to happen that we need to communicate to the Members.

The issue here is not as simple as the Member makes it out to be. We had an issue with a contractor, the contractor that had to be removed from the site or had been taken off the site. The contractor changed. There were some issues with that. Anytime you do a large-scale project of this size and you...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My understanding is that the bridge was shut down temporarily a couple of weeks ago to complete the work that had to be completed. I know that that did not create a tremendous amount of issues. We had some issue with the traffic and people wanting to haul larger loads across. We’re able to accommodate everything at this time. I don’t have the specifics of that contract that the Member refers to, but my understanding is that that’s not an issue. Thank you.

The department and the community of Trout Lake along with the development Corporation and Rowe’s Construction have full intentions of completing the airport this summer, so for sure we’ll be landing at that airport in the fall.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There have been many challenges in the construction of the airport, being weather, quality and quantity of material. However, we have recently completed a change order with the organizations that we’re working with to complete the airport this summer.

I was just making a comparison to the increase in YK. The Member is right; the increase in Tsiigehtchic, although we purchased the price of wholesale fuel for 20 cents a litre more, we charged 19 cents a litre more in Tsiigehtchic, so we did that by trying to use our Stabilization Fund to hold the price for a few months until the winter season was over so that the individuals in the smaller communities weren’t hit with the high fuel prices that we purchased in January. We held the price using our Stabilization Fund until the end of the winter season so that we would try to somehow keep the...

There has been no request at this time from the contractor that’s building the road for additional money in order to complete the project. To date, the money we have here is all the money that we intend on putting into that project to complete the project 100 percent.

There were certainly delays in the installation of the bridge. There was some work on the abutments to ensure that the bridge sat into the abutments properly. I’m not aware that the bridge was actually put in backwards. There was an issue putting the bridge in that caused delays, but the bridge is in properly now and it’s safe.