Tom Beaulieu

Again, as I indicated, we would be pleased to look at both the ATIPP Act and the Public Service Act to see if it would be a legislative proposal which would be shared with all committee members. If this House felt that it would be in the best interest of the public to disclose salaries of individuals, then we will move in that direction. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Legislative authority would have to be changed. The step would be to amend the ATIPP Act and the Public Service Act. Thank you.

Thank you. Generally the winter roads operate in a certain time period. We track the average times in which the roads remain open. As far as the operations costs of the road, these are all done by contract. So we sign the contract with a company to do a certain part of the winter road and we stay with that contract, and that contract is intended to provide services from the time the road opens until the road closes. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. For communication purposes, we’ve communicated, when we saw that the weather was warming up a bit, a possibility of reducing heavy traffic to night traffic, but at this time there are no restrictions. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. No, I don’t. Thank you.

Sometimes, I think, there has been some joint participation between the department and the Students Against Drunk Driving in combatting impaired driving such as check stops and so on. To date, I don’t believe there have been joint efforts with Mothers Against Drunk Driving, but the department would be willing to entertain any joint initiatives that Mothers Against Drunk Driving would like to propose to the department. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Again, on the management costs on highways and also safety regulations, Member Bromley was asking the reason why those two costs went down over the years. I’m just going to have the deputy minister do a response on those two areas.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Department of Transportation works with organizations like the Students Against Drunk Driving and Mothers Against Drunk Driving. We offer some financial support to the Students Against Drunk Driving and we’ve developed a High Risk Drivers Program that we do in consultation with these citizen-based organizations. We consider these organizations to be very important and attribute a lot of the downturn in impaired driving and injuries related to impaired driving to organizations such as MADD and SADD. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Member also spoke about the winter road maintenance and what happens when there is heavier snowfall and so on and it blocks off the roads more than would be anticipated. We build those types of things into our contract, and on the other side, if the season went very well and it was colder than anticipated, then the highway could be extended beyond our contract. We tried to run some of the contracts and the ones down here to about March 31st, and they usually end within that fiscal year. If the road is extended well into April, as sometimes happens further up north...

Mr. Speaker, they are voluntary. They go out to every public servant. They are done across the country and we have about 80 percent participation. Thank you.