Mr. Miltenberger, do you have witnesses?
I do, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. Is committee agreed?
Agreed.
If we can get the Sergeant-at-Arms to please escort the witnesses in, that would be great.
Mr. Miltenberger, can I get you to please introduce your witnesses.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have with me Margaret Melhorn, deputy minister of Financial Management Board, Mr. Russ Neudorf, deputy minister of Transportation, and Mr. Mike Aumond, deputy minister of Public Works and Services.
Thank you, Mr. Miltenberger. We’re on page 8-10, Transportation, Activity Summary, Highways, Infrastructure Investment Summary. Mr. Krutko.
I have a question with regard to the insurance and liability of this government. I have several inquiries from my constituents about the condition of the roads and damages that occurred to their vehicles by way of punctured fuel tanks, busted steering rods and in some cases wheels falling off.
I know this government has under the Department of Finance a risk management and insurance section, and I know that it insures normal wear and tear. But when you have steering rods busting off and people’s tanks being punctured because of the condition of the roads, I think this government has to face the possibility that there is some liability.
I’d like to ask the Minister: exactly what is the case for individuals who find themselves in a situation where they’ve been stranded because of having a wheel busted off? I’ll use a scenario. I know that a number of years ago there was an individual killed on the Dempster Highway when his eighteen-wheeler hit a pothole in the road — basically corroded from the bottom up. The guy hit the hole, flipped his vehicle, and he was killed in the accident. I know this government was taken to court, and it cost us about a million dollars, so there is that liability aspect of our responsibility. We note a lot of times driving the highway that there are these holes along the road. You see them popping up. Once in a while you’ll see an orange cone sticking out of them by way of a marker. But, again, we have to realize that we’re not immune to these liabilities.
I’d just like to ask the Minister: exactly what is the government’s responsibility when it comes to those types of liabilities, knowing we’ve already been taken to court, knowing we’ve already been found to be at fault? Again, I’d like to ask the Minister: exactly where are we in regard to this issue? I know the Minister has been receiving correspondence from a constituent of mine. So that’s why I’m bringing it here today.
Thank you, Mr. Krutko. Minister Miltenberger.
The normal course of practice is that the Government of the Northwest Territories doesn’t pay for damages when the road has been maintained. If there are specific circumstances where there’s litigation and we’re named in the case, that would be a different matter. But as just a general matter of course the practice is that where the road has been maintained to the appropriate standard, we don’t approve payment for claims of damages.
I think this government does have to do a better job of maintenance and dealing with the hazards that are put in front of our travelling public. I think we do have to realize that we have to take some responsibility for that. In cost reduction efforts and whatnot we sometimes sort of forget that public safety is supposed to be paramount. But when you start having three or four people taking buckets of gravel and filling in potholes on a highway because the government is trying to think they’re going to save money, to me that’s not proper maintenance, especially with the condition of the Dempster Highway in the last number of years.
We had previous commitments last spring to see an improvement in the highways. Again, this year has been nothing but complaints when talking to people driving the Dempster. More importantly, read the logs in regard to the visitors’ centre, and you can see exactly what the tourist traffic are saying.
So again I’d like to ask the Minister in regard to this issue about liability associated with the travelling public…. I know that this government has to take some responsibility in regard to those reductions by way of maintenance, in which we are causing damages to individuals’ vehicles because of the conditions of the roads. Have you looked at this whole area of compensation or in regard to insurance? What are we doing by way of risk management to focus on that specific area? I know that people have insurance and whatnot, but again, the insurance usually only covers the PL/PD on a vehicle, so what is the government doing to ensure that?
There are two factors, of course. There is the condition of the road and the condition of the vehicle. We have, clearly, responsibility for the condition of the road and the maintenance that we provide. But as I indicated, the normal course of practice is that we don’t pay out for complaints for damages for people just driving on a road that we are maintaining. The other question that we don’t have a lot of awareness of, of course, is that when we get a complaint, the condition of the vehicle may be involved, that resulted in the complaint. That’s the current status. Thank you.
Mr. Chairman, I believe there is a correlation between maintenance and no maintenance, and we know people are complaining that there is no maintenance being done on the road by government because of cutbacks or reductions. We’ve been telling the people in the field, “Sorry; we don’t have any money; we can’t do any maintenance,” and basically using that as the reason for not doing maintenance. I think we do have a responsibility to ensure that maintenance takes place. Cost reduction reasons is usually the excuse for not doing maintenance.
So I’d like to ask the Minister again: what is this government doing to ensure that whatever we do by way of reductions in policy does hinge on the public safety in regard to the traveling public?
Transportation is spending about $5 million a year on capital and $2 million to $3 million a year on maintenance on the road, which is where we’re demonstrating our commitment to maintaining the Dempster to the best of our ability with the resources that we have.
Thank you, Minister Miltenberger. Next on the list is Mr. Menicoche.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I just want to note that for the communities, they don’t get to see this part of the Leg. work, the Committee of the Whole business. Usually we’ve concluded the TV time, as we call it, for the communities before this section. I’d like to say hello to the communities.
While we’re discussing the capital budget with respect to Transportation, in my region, the Nahendeh riding, we had a huge upset in the travelling public when the roads collapsed in the spring. There are a number of reasons for it, but the main reason is that it is an old road and structure that needs continuous improvement. In fact, that was recognized by our government, and we’ve reconstructed huge sections, especially from the B.C. border towards Fort Liard. That was very much needed. The 20 kilometres they have done to date is a huge improvement. We’d sure like to see the other 12 kilometres done up to the standard that is there. We’re hoping that we can press towards eventually chipsealing that section again. I know that part was chipsealed briefly for the three months before it all broke apart.
There was a good foreshadowing of a much improved road transportation system that we could have, but now we’re seeing to improve the road and do it better. It takes reconstruction to do that, and it takes a lot of our Transportation resources. We have done that in the past using our CSIF dollars, especially at that one section.
The new collapse in the road there, Mr. Chair, is about one kilometre — I think 170 to 190; I may be wrong on that — but for almost two kilometres, maybe more actually, the cover was destroyed right to the sub-base, right to the clay base, and became, in effect, a mudhole, so we shut down the highway system. Transportation tried their best to get it restored in the early months, but they had to wait for better weather to do that. As a result, these roads were shut down.
It is part of our national highway system and also part of our tourism strategy for the NWT to bring tourists off the Alaska Highway and up Highway No. 7 toward the Northwest Territories to come and see the beauty of our great country. But once the word gets out that Highway No. 7 is shut down…. Word of mouth spreads very fast to all the travellers from our southern provinces, as well as the U.S. The fellow that owns an airplane company in Fort Simpson indicated that his contacts in Europe and Germany were actually mentioning the fact that Highway No. 7 was closed in the Nahendeh riding. He said, “Look, Kevin, it’s a very important road; we’ve got to do something about it.”
So this spring I made numerous Member’s statements and got assurances from the Minister at that time that the section that had collapsed would be reconstructed. In fact, I had — I like to say Granny from Nahanni — Granny from Nahanni tell me: “Look, Kevin, what you do is you open the road, and then you bring in more gravel. You fill it in with rip-rap and rebuild the road.” Housewives and grannies are telling me how to reconstruct the road.
What, in effect, they had done for that section is just open it up, dry that clay base and then put it back together, and now they’ve got a good gravel cover. But I’m saying and my people are saying, “That is not good enough, Kevin. Come this spring we just may get the same situation, because in effect the same type of base is still there.” So we’ve got to look at some kind of reconstruction.
Numerous memos and e-mails to the department and to the Minister indicate to me that they’re going to be looking at some more work next year, but what has happened is that they had to take away from the resources that were there initially for the first 32 kilometres, Mr. Chair. To take away that much…. We needed to work and reallocate to another section that collapsed. Maybe there’ll be more; there’s got be more assessment done on Highway No. 7.
It’s that old classic syndrome of taking away from Peter for Paul, Mr. Chair. I cannot advocate for that. In fact, I had thought that here is a sure, good case for extraordinary funding, if any, that our government should identify. Nowhere are there any indications in any of my correspondence that there was extraordinary funding looked at for Highway No. 7, particularly for this collapse of the highway. Often we do that, like when there’s an emergency. We have classic examples of schools collapsing and cracking in half and that kind of infrastructure. You know, there’s emergency funding, and this type of infrastructure is collapsing as well, so I don’t see why it doesn’t qualify for extraordinary funding. I think that should be so.
I just want to talk a little a bit about our discussion on, I believe, last Friday. We removed $1.4 million from, I think it was, Highway No. 5, the chipsealing. I’m not too sure how that was going to work, but we removed $1.4 million. What I would like to see is a reallocation of those resources. I know that’s something the Committee of the Whole has being been discussing and looking at, and at the appropriate time we will debate that in the motion, Mr. Chair.
For me, I would like to continue to reiterate that Highway No. 7 is a very important piece of highway. It was regarded Canada-wide, and even globally people talk about that piece of infrastructure. We’ve got to treat it as such, as a highly valuable piece of infrastructure that we’ve got to continue to rebuild. The case here is to rebuild and reconstruct it.
So I’d like press upon the department that we continue to spend those resources. They will not take away from other reconstruction efforts on that section. That’s the key. Even though it happened in the springtime, the slowdown and the load restrictions on Highway No. 7 impacted us throughout the summer. In fact, there were many, many cases where it caused great disruptions of moving freight, et cetera. I could just go on. Well, actually one of the biggest ones was that we had high school students who got interrupted two ways: once because they got overflowed on Highway No. 1 just this side of the Providence junction, and the school bus went around and just about got interrupted on the Highway No. 7 side to get back to Fort Simpson, but fortunately the road had not deteriorated to where it was impassable at that point. It just goes to show the importance of Highways No. 1 and No. 7.
I cannot reiterate enough the importance to my riding of having a good base transportation infrastructure that is solid and reconstructed. If there’s anything I can ask the Minister at this point, Mr. Chair, it’s this: what exactly is the strategy and the go forward plan to work on and reconstruct Highway No. 7?
Thank you, Mr. Menicoche. Mr. Neudorf.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I certainly do appreciate the comments from the MLA. He was very aware of the situation that happened on the Liard Highway this past year. As I explained before, it was really a series of events that led up to the problems that occurred from section 100 to 125, about a 25 kilometre stretch of road that just, you know, essentially because of the wet fall that we had the year before, because of the way the snow melted in the spring…. It just created all kinds of challenges for us to maintain the surface, coupled with perhaps the lack of the granular surface topping material that was on the road. So we were challenged with that.
We did have a couple of projects in the capital plan in the 2008–2009 fiscal year to deal with Liard Highway. The first was some money that was under the CSIF program, as the Member mentioned there, where we were constructing from kilometre zero to kilometre 20, a benefit for the folks from Fort Liard in their travels south.
We also had another million dollars in the capital plan last year and this current year to take a look and start putting more surfacing material on the remainder of the highway so we could try to get ahead of this type of challenge. That’s essentially why we didn’t need any extraordinary funding last year; we already had a million dollars in the capital plan to address that type of work. We said that at contractor capacity and then our own staff capacity, we knew we couldn’t spend any more than the million dollars, so we used that to direct it to the work that’s required.
The issue is in regard to not being able to carry out the work. I don’t believe that is true. I believe we have the capacity and ability to do as much work as we can, but I’m not going to argue that point with the Minister or his officials. I do want to reference the motion I spoke about earlier. I’d like to move a motion here.
Thank you, Mr. Menicoche.
