Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In follow-up to my statement, I have questions for the Minister of Transportation.
The Minister of Transportation indicated he was going to write the federal Minister of Transportation to get going on the project to do dredging in Hay River. Can he give me an update on where that status is? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Bouchard. Minister of Transportation, Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I have written my letter to the federal government on dredging the Hay River. I have not received their response. Thank you.
I’m just wondering if there’s some sort of process that we have with the federal government. If we’ve written them a letter, it’s been a couple of months now that we haven’t heard back from them. Is there a process that we could actually get some results on this dredging? Thank you.
We know that the officials do talk on a regular basis. We continue to have our officials dealing with the officials from Fisheries and Oceans Canada to see if it’s possible at least to initiate some discussions and see if it’s possible that there could be some dredging done in the Hay River. That will be our attempt to continue discussions with those officials. Thank you.
I’m just wondering if those officials are any prompter than the Minister of Finance or the Minister of Transportation from the federal government, because we sure aren’t getting any results from them.
I’m wondering if the Minister will commit to having a meeting in Hay River with those federal representatives. He’s indicated to me in the past that the Coast Guard and Public Works from the federal government were involved in this process.
Can we get some results in actually seeing the federal government starting to talk in Hay River about dredging the Hay River? Thank you.
I cannot set up meetings for the federal officials. However, we can ask, so I will have the deputy minister from the Department of Transportation, GNWT, contact the officials that are responsible for dredging all rivers up here, mainly Hay River, and try to set up a meeting in Hay River with the federal officials responsible.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Bouchard.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m wondering if we could actually get the federal government in to attending some of these meetings if we got some of those interested parties, if we got NTCL together, if we got the NWT Fishermen’s Federation together, some of those types of people who are desperately in need of this dredging.
Is there a way that we can have some of them if we had a Transportation Strategy meeting and all those people showed up and talked about dredging? Obviously, the Department of Transportation, GNWT Transportation knows this. Is there a way that we can make sure that we have all those parties at the table when we have this meeting set up?
Certainly, we can discuss the consultations we had on the Transportation Strategy, the NWT Transportation Strategy, with the federal government and the desire for all of the people who are using the Hay River, the transport people, fisheries and so on, the Coast Guard, to be able to get together and speak to them about all of the areas where we see the impacts of the fact that we need dredging in Hay River.
Everybody knows that the dredging is needed. It’s just a matter of trying to get people to get the money to get the dredging done.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. The Member for Yellowknife Centre, Mr. Hawkins.
