Debates of February 19, 2015 (day 62)

Thank you, committee. Page 217, funding allocated to health and social service authorities, information item. Any questions?

Speaker: SOME HON. MEMBERS

Agreed.

Thank you. Page 218, lease commitments, information item. Any questions?

Speaker: SOME HON. MEMBERS

Agreed.

Thank you. Page 219, work performed on behalf of others, information item. Any questions?

Speaker: SOME HON. MEMBERS

Agreed.

Thank you. Page 220, work performed on behalf of others, and 221, work performed on behalf of others, information item. Any questions?

Speaker: SOME HON. MEMBERS

Agreed.

Thank you. Committee, if I can get you to return back to page 183. Health and Social Services, total department, $406.886 million. Does committee agree?

Speaker: SOME HON. MEMBERS

Agreed.

Thank you. Does committee agree that consideration of the Department of Health and Social Services is completed?

Speaker: SOME HON. MEMBERS

Agreed.

Thank you, committee. I’d like to thank the Minister. Ms. Mathison, Ms. DeLancey, thanks for joining us this evening. Sergeant-at-Arms, if I can please have you escort the witnesses out of the Chamber. Thank you.

Continuing on with the committee’s wishes, we are going to continue with main estimates. Department of Transportation is next. With that, we’ll go to the Minister responsible for opening comments. Minister Beaulieu.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I am pleased to present the 2015-2016 Main Estimates for the Department of Transportation. These estimates propose an operating budget of $119.5 million for 2015-2016, a decrease of $6.7 million, or 5.3 percent, from the 2014-2015 Main Estimates. Although, this includes budget reductions of almost $1.2 million, the reductions proposed have been selected to minimize the impact on the transportation system while maintaining safety and service levels that communities and industry rely on.

The department operates the NWT public transportation system to provide for the safe, secure, accessible and reliable movement of people and goods. The proposed operations and maintenance activities will continue to protect the infrastructure investments already made in our transportation system while meeting the increasing demands on our network of roads, winter roads, ferries and airports.

The proposed main estimates also include a reduction in annual amortization of $5.7 million. This is a result of accounting treatment changes related to the Inuvik-Tuktoyaktuk highway and a number of transportation assets becoming fully depreciated.

Sunsets include $200,000 for the work currently underway to investigate improved access into the Slave Geologic Province in support of the Mineral Development Strategy. In addition, $2.35 million for interim emergency repairs to address the depression that formed on the Inuvik runway also sunsetted. Additional investigations to assist with long-term solutions are ongoing through partnerships established to advance climate change adaptation research and development.

The department is working to increase the level of services and information it provides in French. This budget includes $163,000 to achieve this goal. The Department is currently working to develop and install highway signs in French, to provide improved French language services on the web and to provide active offers for services in French.

The budget also includes forced growth requirements of $2.8 million to primarily address operations and maintenance contract cost increases across the highway, winter road and airport system.

Transportation infrastructure is essential to the economic health and prosperity of this territory and its residents. It connects our communities, supports exploration and responsible development of our natural resources, and lets business and industry move their products to market. Continued investment in the NWT transportation system is essential to creating a strong economy that will provide jobs and economic opportunities for our residents. We continue with the construction of the Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk highway and to promote additional partnership opportunities in the Mackenzie Valley Highway, the seasonal overland road into the Slave Geologic Province, and the Tlicho road to Whati.

The new Building Canada Plan and renewed partnerships with the federal government will provide the opportunity to continue investing across the existing transportation infrastructure. This ongoing investment will improve system conditions, better connect our communities, enhance safety for our residents and help ensure that the entire network in the NWT is ready to do business.

I am pleased to present the main estimates for the Department of Transportation that will help support the priorities of the 17th Assembly and a sustainable fiscal future.

That concludes my opening remarks. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Minister Beaulieu. Minister Beaulieu, do you have witnesses you’d like to bring into the House?

Yes, I do, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Minister Beaulieu. Does committee agree?

Speaker: SOME HON. MEMBERS

Agreed.

Thank you, committee. Sergeant-at-Arms, if you could please escort the witnesses into the House. Minister Beaulieu, if you’d be kind enough to introduce your witnesses for the record.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Today with me to my immediate right is Russell Neudorf, deputy minister, Department of Transportation; to my far right, Jim Martin, director of corporate services; to my left, Daniel Auger, assistant deputy minister, Department of Transportation. Daniel will be retiring in May so this will be his last appearance for the main estimates.

Thank you, Minister Beaulieu. Mr. Neudorf, Mr. Martin, Mr. Auger, welcome, gentlemen, to the House. It’s always a pleasure to have you back here.

Committee, with that, we’ll turn it to general comments. Starting off I have Mr. Bouchard.

Robert Bouchard

Hay River North

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I thank the Minister, and thanks to the representatives for being here. Obviously, we’re probably …(inaudible)…for all the years of service now that you’re leaving.

I’d like to start about transportation and maybe the overall strategy of highways in the Northwest Territories. I guess some of the frustrating part has been the fact that over the years the department has been starting a project and stopping a project. The road to Fort Res, the road to Fort Smith, even the road to Fort Simpson have been worked on sporadically by doing a couple hundred kilometres here, a couple kilometres there, but there’s no consistency. I think for a few years there was consistency and they were getting the roadway done. I know we’re doing a multi-model strategy on transportation and I’m hoping that from there we’re going to have a plan going forward of how we implement this, how do we get all these… Some of these roads are really good. I was just on the road to Res last weekend. I’ve been to Smith recently. Those are good roads, but it would be nice if they were chipsealed and we completed that and upgraded it for the residents as well as tourism.

The road to Simpson, obviously, Highway No. 7, like Mr. Menicoche, as he indicated to us, I think it’s key. I think they’re key to our highway system as far as for tourism. I’ve always been a supporter of upgrading that road. I know there are hundreds of thousands of people that travel from BC, from Alberta, BC up to the Yukon and up to Alaska, and if we only captured a small percentage of them we’d probably double our tourism road numbers easily in one year. I think we need to figure out a plan going forward on how we’re implementing that two or three kilometres in each section each year to get to the point where we actually have them completed. I think we’re in the process of maybe doing the last section towards Res, which is going to be exciting as far as being able to drive there and not have to deal with gravel roads.

That overall structure, we talk about Mackenzie Valley Highway and now it’s almost been a slant. It seems like, from our perspective, that there’s been a slant to talk about the Slave Geological area. Obviously, a very economical area for us, the diamond mines and a lot of that support there, a lot of that GDP there. But I think we’ve got to set our priorities of where our people are too. It’s not that I don’t support that concept of getting that road more permanent so the winters last longer, but I think it’s going to have to be a partnership with some of the people that are invested in that area. I don’t know where we are numbers-wise of that partnership but I think that’s something we have to work on.

One of the areas that I’ve heard complaints about, and I’ve talked to NTCL, one of our shipping companies, they’ve seen some of our infrastructure requirements and plans and a lot of them don’t involve marine. We’re focused on roads. Obviously, I think that’s an important area, too, but we need to take in those type of industries, as well and the need for them. Obviously, I’m going to mention my, it’s not two words, it’s only one word. It’s dredging, dredging of the Hay River. We’ve heard from other Members the need of dredging in different communities. We know it was a situation with low water last year to service the communities throughout the Northwest Territories. I think there was probably an additional cost to Fort Good Hope, to Inuvik and some of those places that didn’t get their product this year. I think we need to look at that. I know it’s a federal responsibility, but we as the territorial government have to work out a plan of how… We’re the ones that are affected. The federal government sits in Ottawa still and they could give two cents about what’s happening up here. We are the ones that are being affected. It’s our residents that are being affected by the low water, by the amount of sediment that’s in the river systems. We need to work on dredging. We need to figure out the number, then we need to go to the federal government and lobby them to get funds to do the dredging required in the Hay River area as well as in the other parts of the Northwest Territories. I think that’s very important.

I’ll bring up another issue that I know I’ve brought to the attention of several people before. It’s the trucking regulations. There’s just an inconsistency there. I don’t know how to get the department to move forward on evaluating the trucking regulations. We’ve got an experimental tri-drive program right now. It seems to be working and I’ve heard some good things from industry about it, but there are too many inconsistencies about our weights, about our dimensions, about what a pickup does, and if a pickup is a commercial pickup but it’s pulling a trailer, now that’s completely different. Whereas, in Alberta if a pickup is pulling anything, a pickup is a pickup. We’ve deemed it to be a different type of unit. I know some of that has come about from the bridge but the point is that we want to be supportive of industry and business and that type of activity is not supportive to business. We’ve got a lot of small businesses that run pickups and keep it under a small weight because that’s what they can afford to run. We’ve got guys that are running bobcats, running trailers to do work, to bring materials to the job sites in different parts of the communities and some of them have to go across the bridge, and that’s an extra toll and they’re just adding it to the cost. We need to look at this regulation stuff.

This licence plate on the front versus the back and as soon as you cross the border you’re supposed to switch it over. We’ve got to find a solution to that. That’s not conducive to our territory, Alberta and the Northwest Territories who are linked together. That’s where 95 percent of our products come from is Alberta. We’ve got to straighten these regulations out. It continues to be a problem and I hear it from all the industry guys. We have people that have company trucks and if they’re a small enough operation they’re switching over to a private plate just to be able to avoid it. We should know that we have a problem with this system if people are having to circumvent the system, charge their company their personal times and reverse this just to avoid the government’s regulations and lack of changing their regulations.

The last point I have is just a concern that I’m hearing in Hay River as far as the Hay River maintenance garage. I could be corrected. I thought it was a territorial maintenance garage in Hay River, and it seems like there’s more and more maintenance happening in different regions, and I want to point out that I think that maintenance garage in Yellowknife has been growing, the maintenance staff in Yellowknife have been growing, and I think less and less products have been moving back to Hay River to be repaired and some is being done here. I guess it’s kind of slippage. Sometimes we let some of this stuff happen and it does slip away, the fact that some of these things happen, but we need to refocus where our maintenance crew is.

I’ll have some detailed questions later on, but those are my general comments.

Thank you, Mr. Bouchard. We’ll allow the Minister to reply. Mr. Beaulieu.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The inconsistency, as the Member referred to it, of the work that’s been done on Highway No. 6, Highway No. 5, Highway No. 7, Highway No. 1, is we are following the flow of the money. We had some BCP money that expired. We had some and those highways didn’t have some money. But Highway No. 6, we think we have the money now to complete it to chipseal state. Highway No. 5, we have to deal with the federal government, Parks Canada, because Highway No. 5 runs through Wood Buffalo National Park. So we’ve been having discussions with the federal people about their infrastructure and we recognize that federal parks did get some infrastructure money for their infrastructure. They consider that highway to be a part of the infrastructure. It was ineligible for the Building Canada Plan. So we’re dealing with that issue.

Highway No. 7 is a highway that was built essentially by students in the early to mid-‘70s and it was mostly designed to train heavy equipment operators and truck drivers and it doesn’t have a real solid base, so we recognize that we have to upgrade sections of that road. We’ve done a considerable amount of work on that highway from Liard to the border and then we’re planning on doing some more work from Liard this way. I don’t know the exact distance, or to kilometre 130, which again, I guess, would be about 90 kilometres from Liard.

So we’re going to concentrate on that 90 kilometres. Out of Liard seems to be the worst of that highway. Meanwhile we’re also continuing to maintain that highway; we have a maintenance contract on it. We’re doing road right-of-way work on that highway.

Highway No. 1, we are chipsealing portions of Highway No. 1. We’ve had a discussion with Jean Marie River, as an example, when we were in there and they were looking to get about… I believe they’d indicated to us 30 kilometres and it will take them all the way to Simpson. So I believe that that’s in the plan this summer. So then from Jean Marie all the way into Simpson will now have chipseal. Then parts of the other part of Highway No. 1 from the junction that goes to Highway No. 3 junction near Fort Providence, 24 kilometres from Fort Providence, we’re starting to do chipseal between there and the Jean Marie River turnoff. So we’re continuing to work on that.

The Mackenzie Valley Highway versus the Slave Geological Province overland road to support industry, they’re two completely separate proposals. We’re moving forward. We have not slowed down the Mackenzie Valley Highway proposal at all. We’ve submitted the proposal to the federal government. The federal government still knows that that’s the only proposal we have in and that we are developing a business case. We’re close to completing that business case. It’s taking some work to put everything together. There’s a lot of information that the federal government wants in as far as the economic impacts and so on of the highway, so we’re looking at that.

Slave Geological, we have some money to put into that to do some studies. That is something that has been in the works for a long time. At the time Transportation was devolved, in 1989, that was already in the works that they wished to evolve some extension of the highway beyond Tibbitt.

Marine, I guess we could say it’s a federal responsibility. However, we’ve been saying it’s a federal responsibility for a long time, because it is, but we want to try to encourage the federal government to put some funds into dredging. We know there are about five areas that need dredging in order to have the whole waterway from Hay River all the way to Inuvik hauling at full capacity. We would have to dredge more than just the port of Hay River, but that seems to be the key spot. A lot of the federal government boats are not leaving the ferry without getting into some trouble. So I wrote a letter to the federal Minister last week to talk about the dredging.

Trucking regulations, our regulations are in place for safety of the residents of the Northwest Territories. Alberta has different regulations. They regulate their trucking industry, so they are doing the best they can for their citizens. We do the same. It has worked fairly well. There are a few glitches, as the Member indicates, but one of the recommendations was to identify which vehicles were commercial and which were not commercial, depending on what they’re hauling and so on. We don’t have the manpower to be able to determine that. We’d have to stop everyone and check everyone to make sure they are not hauling for commercial reasons. So it is something we are looking at and saying that what we have in place is the best solution. That’s why we’ve developed those regulations. We didn’t develop regulations thinking they would have an adverse effect on our citizens, but rather for safety issues and also for our own infrastructure.

Central repair in Hay River is still central repair in Hay River. We do have an aging fleet, so a lot of the fleet that’s up here – and we do have a lot of equipment up here, so we do have repairs here – but for the most part the larger machinery still goes to Hay River. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Committee, noting the clock, I will now rise and report progress. I would like to thank our witnesses this evening. We’ll see you tomorrow. Sergeant-at-Arms, if you could please escort the witnesses out of the House. Thank you.

Report of Committee of the Whole