Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I have some questions on the Deh Cho Bridge for the Minister of DOT. Mr. Speaker, can the Minister tell me if the entire management structure for the Deh Cho Bridge is the sole responsibility of DOT or is there any management outside of DOT for the Deh Cho Bridge? Thank you.
The honourable Minister of Transportation, Mr. McLeod.
Mr. Speaker, Transportation and our officials track all expenditures and have the monthly reports, the daily reports and the annual auditing of all revenues and expenditures. Thank you.
I’ll assume that means that management is standing by the Department of Transportation. I was wondering if the Minister could provide me with some information in the sense of looking for schedules versus stages of construction. I was wondering if the Minister could provide me with a project status report on the Deh Cho Bridge. Thank you.
Mr. Speaker, we do have status reports that are compiled on a daily basis by the different companies that we have. We also do our own. We do it on a weekly and monthly basis. We certainly can provide a reconciliation of where the expenditures are versus the construction schedule. Mr. Speaker, we are a little over 80 percent, moving towards 85 percent of our expenditures, of our budget being spent, and we’re probably at the same level with our construction schedule. So roughly a little more than 80 percent of our budget is spent and a little more than 80 percent of our contract schedule is concluded. Thank you.
I’m not trying to suggest how something of this magnitude should be managed, but I’m wondering if the department did a cash flow of the original budget, original cost of the bridge, if that was cash flowed from the beginning to the end of the project was supposed to be intended to come to an end, I guess, so to speak. I’m wondering if the budget was turned into a cash flow during the construction stage. Thank you.
We are closely tracking all expenditures. We have a breakdown, we have cash flow charts, we have variances, we have spreadsheets that provide all the information that the Member has brought forward, we have a breakdown of the budget by various components, we provide year-to-year expenditures on each item and we forecast each expenditure to the completion of the project, so we do have all the information and we do track it very closely. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Final supplementary, Mr. Beaulieu.
Mahsi cho, Mr. Speaker. I consider the variance report to be part of project management, especially huge project management. I’m wondering if, since the Minister did refer to a variance report but saying verifying variance report is what I’m hearing, I’m wondering if the Minister could provide us a variance report, one variance report that compares a cash flow with expenditures so the House could determine where we’re at, like, if we’re on schedule with the construction, if we’re on schedule with the flow of money. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Some of this information is available publicly. Our financial audit is done on an annual basis. It’s reviewed by the Auditor General. The information is something we can certainly share. Mr. Speaker, we’ve asked for some committee time to talk about some of the details regarding schedules, regarding budgets and things of that nature. I believe we’ve managed to secure some time so we can have an opportunity to sit down and look at some of these things in depth, including the risk matrix and things of that nature that maybe will provide some comfort to the Members with further detail. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
The honourable Member for Sahtu, Mr. Yakeleya.
