Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m going to chime in here with my colleague Mr. Menicoche. What we’re hearing here today is absolutely hogwash. We’ve got a northern contractor here, the only northern contractor left that has yet to be paid for the work and services they did on the bridge, and we’ve got a referee program that we’ve clearly documented and the government has said we agree with the terms, we just don’t have the money left.
What kind of message are we telling our contractors out there? Please do the work for the government and we’ll pay you when we think or when we feel?
The Minister talks about ATCON and monies left over. Let’s talk about the facts. I’ve got correspondence from June 26th sent to my office from the department that clearly says that the terms of the agreement with the Government of New Brunswick, who secured the ATCON letter of credit, that these funds were to be used for deficiencies in the project caused by ATCON. From the Minister’s own words to my office, we have an amount of $690,707. Why isn’t the Minister using those funds and putting a little pressure on New Brunswick to pay our bills?
Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. The Minister of Transportation, Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The deficiencies, I think that seems to be the key here. The work was done by ATCON. The money given to us from the New Brunswick government was to clean up the deficiencies. There are deficiencies on the work that Rowe’s had performed for ATCON, as well, and that’s part of the work that we are doing. But the deficiencies to finish the bridge, we have about $700,000 to $800,000 worth of deficiencies still on the bridge. We have about $750,000 in that account. We want to use that money to finish the deficiencies.
Let’s actually speak about all the numbers, shall we, because we’re kind of dancing and skirting around the issue. As I said, ATCON has a holdback of $696,707, plus this government has a holdback with Ruskin and ATCON for over $958,000. Clearly, we’ve got two pots of money here that could be used to pay the bills that are outstanding to the project. Will the Minister commit to paying this bill?
No. Not in this forum.
Can the Minister indicate why?
Because we need to provide the documentation to the Government of New Brunswick that will validate the payment. This is not exactly what we got the money for. We got that money to do the deficiencies on the bridge, pay for the deficiencies on the bridge. There is more work to be done on the bridge. There are more deficiencies. This money wasn’t given to us so that we could pay companies that didn’t get all of the payments for the work that they’ve done with a company that went bankrupt.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Dolynny.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It’s clear this government expects private industry to pay our financing for projects, and this is unacceptable.
As we said clearly, we went to an arbitrator, we agreed with the arbitration that we owe this contractor money. We’ve got two pots of money that are clearly in detail to use for such things as a payment back to a contractor. We’ve got holdbacks. We’ve got workings with the government. Again, this is a perfect, clear-cut case that we should be paying our bills.
Why is this Minister, why is this Cabinet, why is this government refusing to support local businesses and why aren’t they paying this bill?
This government supports lots of local and northern businesses. This is an issue where we need to have the proper documentation and we need to have the legal grounds to pay out of what is not considered to be exactly the reason that we got money. We weren’t given the mandate to just spend the money wherever we felt, wherever we felt pressure, wherever we felt that individuals were coming and trying to present this from a political perspective. We have a referee’s report, number one, and number two, the referee’s report said two of those had technical merit, that they felt that two of those claims were work that was actually done by Rowe’s but they weren’t necessarily deficiencies that are left on the bridge.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. The Member for Hay River North, Mr. Bouchard.
