Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. It’s been well documented, and I’ll repeat it again, I certainly support the Inuvik-Tuk Highway Project as a project and I believe very strongly in the aspirations of the people of the Beau-Del region. I think they deserve their project in their own way and, in time, I have great confidence this project will come.
So when I talk about the Inuvik-Tuk highway I only talk about it as in the context of the work that still needs to be done. There are many details and many questions that still are outstanding, and no matter how we try to poke away and get to the facts or to the bottom of these issues, the threads keep unwinding and we still are not given the true story of the risk of this project.
I call the government to lay before the House and the people of the Northwest Territories a plain language document, one that discusses the risks, one that talks about the government’s plan to mitigate the risks. This is not a hypothetical situation. These are realities before any large, major project. These are jobs that they would do anyway. The people of the Northwest Territories need to know and understand what deal has the Government of the Northwest Territories brokered with the federal government.
We have to understand what happens if cost overruns do not meet the expectation of the $299 million on sale highway for the Inuvik-Tuk highway. This is not a deal held firm and held strong by targets, this is a deal where the Government of Canada will leave the people of the Northwest Territories hanging if cost overruns skyrocket.
I want to use the opportunity to harken the Members of this Assembly back to January 20, 1985. I received some documents from the Minister of Transportation that reflect this next point. If things are missing, I point the finger at the department for missed gaps. So I’m working, simply, with the information before me. It says, “DIAND shall be responsible for approving and providing funding for…,” and if you go to one of the clauses, it says, “the construction of a new bridge at the Yellowknife River,” and we’re referring at Fort Providence, so we’d be referring to the Deh Cho Bridge.
Well, if I go back to the first statement, “DIAND shall be responsible for providing funding for…,” you can see how well that deal worked out for us. We have a $202 million project that even they said in their transfer agreement that they would be behind.
There are many, many questions before this project. It’s not a question do we like the project, we just want to make sure it gets off in the right way. Thank you very much.
