Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Earlier, in my Member’s statement, I spoke about the Lafferty ferry extension of the hours beginning around 7 a.m. until midnight. I’d like to ask the Minister of Transportation how much work has been done in accessing this possibility. Thank you.
Thank you. Minister of Transportation, Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We’ve had the regional superintendent from Transportation meet with the chief and council. They wish to meet and discuss the hours of operation of the Lafferty ferry. Also, we’ve looked at what hours are possible for the operation that we have and the employees we have on the ferry. Thank you.
That’s great. Like I said in my Member’s statement, I know we’re getting support from the leadership in Fort Simpson. There are three councils: the Metis, the LKFN and the Village of Fort Simpson. But residents are also saying they like the idea of a 7 a.m. start; they really want to keep the 12 p.m. closure at midnight.
If the department really wanted to cost-save by adding an extra hour, how much of a barrier would the Minister see of extending it one more hour so that all the needs of Fort Simpson businesses and constituents can be addressed? Thank you.
Mr. Speaker, with the amount of employees that we have and the hours of operation and start-up time and shutdown time, the barrier is the Canadian Labour Code. They only allow an individual doing that type of work to work a maximum of 60 hours. With the shifts, I think we’re very close to that. Adding an extra hour means that individuals will be over that time allotment. That is the barrier right now, so I don’t know what the alternative would be.
Just on that, I know that it’s going from a 16 hour day to a 17 hour day, and the department had initial concerns about, and I think the Minister said it as well, about approaching their weekly work limits. As I brought this to constituents, as well, they’re saying, well, wait a minute, in Fort Providence they were running from 6 a.m. until 12 p.m. and they didn’t have those same concerns, so maybe the Minister can elaborate exactly what the concern is from going to 16 to 17 hours, recognizing that they had done 18 hours running the Merv Hardie.
I’m not familiar with how many employees that were on the Merv Hardie at Fort Providence is at this time and how they worked the hours to get all of the individuals that are working at this time into those hours and still stay within the allowable codes for the Canadian Labour Code. I would have to investigate what had occurred at that point back in the Merv Hardie so that we were able to run that. I understand that some of the difference could be the fact that the ferry had to run longer, so we made compensation by adding employees due to the volume of traffic in Fort Providence.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Menicoche.
Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. In just evaluating the extension of the hours, I would suggest a test run, as well, to see if it’s doable from 7 a.m. until midnight. I would suggest a test run. I’m not saying that we do a full implementation of a ferry change, but if we can do a test run, we can test all these parameters and see if there is additional cost. It might be for the remainder of the summer there. Like I said, it will be a small change for a big benefit for the residents of Fort Simpson and the Nahendeh region.
I will have the department look at that possibly. I do believe that we have a certain amount of staff, like I indicated, and then we were getting close to that maximum, so if we were to do something different, I think we would have to add staff. I will have the department go back and look at that. At this time, as I indicated, the labour code seems to be the issue, and that we had talked to the members of the Liidlii Kue First Nation and their feeling was that if we had a 16-hour window that we could slide, that they would prefer to stay with the current hours and not open at 7:00 a.m.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. The Member for Mackenzie Delta, Mr. Blake.
