Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I wanted to continue on with the line of questioning that my colleague Mr. Abernethy had. It gets back to the cost shared infrastructure proposal that the government put on the table.
Going back to what the Premier mentioned on Friday, I can understand that they have to get on with things. They have to do things. Move and move quickly, I think were the words the Premier used. Again, I understand that. But you don’t develop a substantive proposal, a framework as he calls it, overnight.
I’d like to ask the Premier: who put the proposal together?
I hope I get most of the response here right, as I didn’t quite hear the last part of the question. But I’ll try and respond to what I did hear.
The work that’s been ongoing originally started with an opportunity to sit down with the Prime Minister. I had about 20 minutes with him to give him the idea that we needed to look at other options, to put on record with the Prime Minister that the deal that was put forward by Finance Canada during the last government and that seems to carry on through this government wasn’t satisfactory, that we were not prepared to go there, but there are other options that we could work on. At that point we felt there was enough uptake on the idea that there may be some other options, and we started putting some ideas together.
One of the other things that I spoke regularly about during my time as Premier for the Northwest Territories was about the Mackenzie Valley Highway. So I’ve put those two together as a possible option.
The best I can cobble together from the correspondence that was provided to Members and the timeline…. I think this framework was presented to the Prime Minister in Inuvik. That would have happened at the same time the Members of this Legislature were at the Gwich’in health and wellness camp just outside of Inuvik.
The question that I have: if the Premier, as the leader of our government, is going to make a substantive offer or a proposal to the Prime Minister while he’s in our backyard, why wouldn’t he at least tell us that he was doing that, Mr. Speaker?
Mr. Speaker, the fact of the meeting’s happening and the time frame we did…. Again, I go back to the fact that I needed to have an idea that the federal government would take this up and carry it forward and on that basis feel comfortable that we could proceed.
Notification that the Prime Minister was travelling up was rather short, and as Members were aware, trying to get some time set aside to actually have a one on one about the Northwest Territories with the Prime Minister was quite difficult. That doesn’t give any excuse to the fact that we were there. And, yes, at caucus I probably should have put that on the table and shared that letter with them before it went to him.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the Premier for that. I do believe that at the very least he had an obligation to tell the Members who were in Inuvik at the time that this was taking place. That didn’t happen, and that’s unfortunate.
From the time the proposal was made until Members were notified was, I think, 38 days. Again, I don’t understand why, if we’re making a substantive proposal like that, it would take 38 days to let Members know.
In his comments to me on Friday the Premier also stated that he was looking forward to getting together with the committee to go over some of this. Are we going to get the framework in its entirety or just what the government wants us to see, Mr. Speaker?
Mr. Speaker, as I said earlier, the letter I sent to Members has what we have on the table. We can share all the information about how we came up with this number in the hope of having something further. I would rather do it that way than try to get into a process here and have the federal government decide: well, they’re discussing it there, and there’s no real commitment and no use having any further discussion. I’m ready to share all the information we have, and I believe we have given that to the Members. But we can go through it in more detail or have more questions at that point as well as to what we’ve put on the table and what we hope to achieve.
Thank you, Mr. Roland. Final supplementary, Mr. Ramsay.
Mr. Speaker, it just gets back to my first question. I’m not sure if the Premier heard the end of that first question, so I will ask that one again. I’m just wondering: who put the framework together for the Government of the Northwest Territories to be presented to the federal government?
Mr. Speaker, the Executive and a number of the other departments that have the information pulled this together. We worked with a number of other people who had access and could give us information on times, and we pulled that together. But it was pretty well done internally on this one.
Thank you, Mr. Roland. The honourable Member for Nunakput, Mr. Jacobson.
