As I stated in the House yesterday, we want to move forward with painting the lines on the highway, weather permitting, and this would be including the line along the edge of the highway where people can walk. Weather permitting, we are committed to doing that within the next coming weeks, so long as the weather is there.

The Member is absolutely right. This is a 60/40 plan costshared with the federal government, and the annual contribution last year from the federal government was $732,000 and the GNWT was providing up to $488,000 in this program. The movement of programming dollars to ENR's Take a Kid Harvesting and Take a Kid Trapping programs has negatively impacted ITI's Growing Forward equity funding, so what we've done is ITI is currently checking with other departments such as Health and Social Services and ENR to see if they have any programs that could fall under this funding requirement to help us to...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We've had the opportunity to bring the Agriculture Strategy to the Standing Committee on Economic Development and Environment, and, based on their review of the document, we are revising the daft presently and putting in their recommendations, and once it's completed the draft will be circulated to other departments and include their internal reviews, and once that's done it's our goal to bring the draft back to committee next month.

One of the priority actions outlined in the mandate of the Assembly is to capture opportunities to invest in transportation and infrastructure by working to secure funding to advance the Mackenzie Valley highway, the all-weather road to Whati, and to improve access to the Slave geological province. I can assure the House and Members that I am taking every opportunity to encourage and invest – investment in the key of these three corridors. I personally met with Minister Sohi in the federal department to talk about this as well as Minister Garneau to reiterate the importance of the corridors to...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The department drafted a letter to inform the Standing Committee on Economic Development and Infrastructure of the federal government's decision to temporarily suspend the Mackenzie Valley Highway funding proposal. Unfortunately, the correspondence was delayed to Committee.

I appreciate the importance of keeping Members informed on decisions around the federal infrastructure funding and have taken steps to ensure decisions are communicated in a timely manner. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Of course we recognize the positive impacts that this money has in the communities. This fund actually increases seasonal employment in many communities in the Northwest Territories as well as helps with project management and helps these communities look at some of these projects moving forward. We do recognize the positive impacts they have and that is some of the reasons why we are going through our fiscal policies we are promoting for this next fiscal budget so we can have money to invest in some of these small community initiatives.

I can't speak for the Minister of Lands, so I suggest that the Member direct his question to the Minister of Lands on that.

Thank you Mr. Speaker. I have had a number of discussions with the department on the Community Access Road Program, mostly around funding applications and where certain applications are at, but I have never had the discussion about increasing funding. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As the Member is well aware, Esso has filed an interim closure reclamation plan. This is early days for this stuff. It's just to get out there and get some input on how the field may be shut down and get input into it, but Esso is still operating and it will continue to operate for a number of years to come, and I don't see the need for us to be getting involved with this just yet. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

No, I cannot make that commitment here today because I believe, if we are going to do this, this is the same similar situation we had in Hay River. There had to be a traffic study done and bring all user groups together, how we would move forward with this, what type of even traffic stuff we would have to have in place there. There are various things that would have to be considered. But what I do commit to in this House is I would sit down with all the user groups, as I said yesterday, the City of Yellowknife, the Niven Lake working group, Alternatives North, the Yellowknife Members, and...