Wally Schumann

Traditionally, NTCL publish their sailing schedule close to the operating season, in May, if I remember correctly, of each year. The government is committed to providing a firm sailing schedule prior to that date. I know the people in the Department of Public Works and Services who are taking on this work are working very hard and diligently to put this together so we can come up with a schedule that will satisfy the communities and staff so they can start their planning session. We are hoping to have something out to them by April.

I think there is a play on words here. The Mining Incentive Program is already in place. It is well received. It was actually oversubscribed in the past year. As I said, I commit to looking, in the life of this Assembly, to find a way to put more money into this program in coming years.

Mr. Speaker, the Government of the Northwest Territories has made a commitment in its mandate to capture opportunities for investment in transportation infrastructure by working to secure funding to improve access into the Slave Geological Province. Today I would like to provide an update on the department’s progress on this project.

Improving road access into the Slave Geological Province has been a long-term objective of the Governments of Canada and the Northwest Territories. This long-term vision includes connecting to an all-weather road and deep-water Arctic port in western Nunavut...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As the Department of Transportation, we continue to monitor all our embankments on the highway system and make sure we have safe travelling public, proper drainage on the highway system, and we will continue to do that. I can update the Member after session if he wants to have a bigger discussion around this issue.

I guess I can go into a little story about this situation. There was a place built there in 2000, where the Member is referring to, just off the access of the Dempster Highway. This was built in an area where a lot of drainage was a problem. The Department of Housing got involved; the Department of Transportation got involved. We moved the particular residents out of this area at the two departments' expense and relocated them. Another individual has now since moved into that location, knowing that all the particular problems were there. Along the course of that timeline, a couple of culverts...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The reason we are doing the P3 business case, as I've said, moving forward is it is going to give us a better idea on construction costs on the construction of this road now that the route has been determined, which took a number of years to get that figured out. This is just going to give us a better idea of costing of the project. Once that is done, then we will probably sit down, no different from the Whati road, and see which makes the best case; national infrastructure process, which is the federal government hasn't clearly laid out the rules around that yet, or a...

All that is probably going to depend on what is going to happen with the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board. We have no control over what they are doing. The other thing that we are looking at doing is we are going to put out a request for qualifications on this process for this road. That should be coming out shortly. We don't want to get ahead of the environmental process.

As I made a comment in my earlier statement, we brought a number of Sahtu residents to Yellowknife in particular last year for an agriculture conference; this is some of the stuff that we heard there that we put in towards our agriculture strategy. I don't think we need to have another conference already to do that. If the Member from the Sahtu would like us to work closely with the residents of the Sahtu, we can have our superintendent reach out to him and see how we can facilitate that.

That is a Nunavut project. I am not the Minister of Transportation for Nunavut. I would have to check with the colleagues in Nunavut. As far as I am concerned, that is a Nunavut project, and I don't have any of that information.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I thank the Member for the question on Growing Forward 2, because this is an important initiative that the Government of the Northwest Territories has been working on in collaboration with the federal government on bringing agriculture to the Northwest Territories. For the past five years, we have spent approximately $6 million on this program in the Northwest Territories and invested it directly into NWT agriculture. I thank him for that.

In the upcoming season, I suspect that I would have to get that directly from the department, but I am assuming that it is probably...