Statements in Debates
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The department is presently in the process of entering into a contract with the staffing contractor to provide crew, operations of tugs to operate the tugs and the barges for this year, and we are hoping to have that in place this week. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As we have had this conversation in Committee of the Whole, I said we had a great opportunity at mineral roundup to get input from all stakeholders in the industry. We put our budget forward. This is what we have in there. I made a commitment that, in the life of this Assembly, we will look at what we can do towards increasing that. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
I will have a look at the situation. We will get back to the Member, but if it is not impeding the safe usage of the highway, we will not be looking at doing anything.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I'd have to get the exact particulars from the Member of which incident he's talking about and the location. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
We haven't totally decided that right now. As I said in my statement today, we are doing a P3 business case assessment on the corridor of the Slave Geological Province. When this business case is completed, which we are hoping to have done by mid2017, this will give us a better idea how to make a decision on how we move this process forward. It is going to give us a little better idea on the cost of construction of the road, as well as determine the appropriate funding model, and that is what we will determine at the end of that.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As we have announced in this House, the federal government has made a commitment to the Whati-Tlicho all-season road. We are working on a number of initiatives within the Department of Transportation presently. One of them is to get through the environmental assessment process with the Mackenzie Valley Environment Impact Review Board. That was brought forward in July of the past year. We continue to work on that. The next step on that process is we need to draft an adequacy statement response that satisfies the requirements of the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact...
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As I have said, that is a Nunavut process. That is their decision to make. We are worried about our territory. I am worried about the Slave Geological Province and how we move it forward. We will continue to work with Environment and Natural Resources to get all the critical information for how we can propose this corridor to move forward.
Nutrition North is a federal program to increase access to perishable nutritious food across the Northwest Territories and help reduce the cost. Its objective actually lines up quite a bit with the agriculture strategies of the Northwest Territories. Ideally, we want to get the agriculture in the Northwest Territories to a point where we wouldn't need to have Nutrition North to help subsidize the cost of food in the NWT, but we are not there yet. We will have to continue to work with our federal partners and Nutrition North and our commercial producers in the Northwest Territories on how we...
I believe that is already habitat of the Bathurst caribou range and probably other ranges of caribou from the Arctic coast.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I believe I committed to keeping committee well-informed as we move forward, as we secure opportunities of different types of revenue of moving forward, the sailing schedule, the staffing issues and stuff, and in the coming months and weeks I am hoping to update committee on where we are at with these new assets.