Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to ask a few questions of the Minister of Transportation. It’s regarding, again, safety on our highways, and in particular the stretch between Yellowknife and Behchoko on Highway 3. This stretch has been raised with constituents of mine on a number of occasions now about the conditions of this highway. They’ve shared with me some complaints about potholes, washboard, a lot of ups and downs, dips and dews, bumps, and visibility issues, Mr. Speaker. Now at this time of the year, with a lot of trucks travelling up and down that highway, it has become even more of a concern. I’d like to ask the Minister: what exactly is the problem with this particular stretch of highway as it relates to an engineering aspect? Why is it this particular stretch that is so severely damaged? I’ll leave it at that. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Masi. Minister of Transportation.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As anyone who knows anyone who has driven this stretch of highway in the last few years know, it’s a very challenging section of highway in the Northwest Territories; probably one of the most challenging. Due to the permafrost degradation and stuff that’s happening out there and the melting and disturbances that are happening on that section of highway, the department had to reach out to the federal government a number of years ago to get some research dollars to have a look at this and develop a program and have test sections on this highway. I think we have four sections, if I remember correctly, on Highway 3 to determine the most effective option to look at how we can assess the ground conditions and how we can move forward with repairs.
With that said, we’ve actually spent $18 million on this road in the last four years. As I said many times in this House, I can probably take all the infrastructure money in the Northwest Territories and put it into highways and it would never fix or infrastructure deficit just in the highway system in the Northwest Territories due to the challenges that we have based around climate change. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you to the Minister for his reply. I appreciate that the Government of the Northwest Territories is working with other orders of government to release or some form of funding to help invest in this concern; but that’s also troubling to know that over the last four years we’ve put $18 million into the stretch of highway that still proves to be a safety issue and continues to be a challenge.
I’d like to ask the Minister: what is the ultimate answer for fixing this stretch of highway? How are we going to stop going from putting band aids on it to making and finding a permanent, safe solution for this stretch of highway?
As I’ve said, we’ve worked with Transport Canada to leverage the dollars to monitor and assess the performance of this road with the conditions that we’re presently under. Like I said, with climate change, it makes it very difficult to keep up with the maintenance of it, especially with the lack of capital dollars that we have available to us to do this; but we will continue to do our research and monitoring this road and try to come up with new rehabilitative techniques on how we’re going to address this problem moving forward. I can keep Members informed on some of those test results from research moving forward.
Again, I’m going to appreciate the commitment here that the Minister is making with regard to the road and improving the road itself. Let’s skip over for a moment and talk about public safety.
What can the Minister share with us in terms of how we’re going to in the meantime make sure that folks that are travelling up and down this road; a number of them in fact for the first time tourists coming to the North? What are we going to be doing to make sure that their safety is protected in the meantime? By that, I mean will we have improved signage? Will we have maybe potentially reduced speed limits, something of that nature? Can the Minister please explain to us how are we protecting people who use the highway?
The department regularly evaluates the condition of the. We have our maintenance crews that travel up and down the highway daily to gather information daily. They give us feedback on that. We have, as I said, our test sections that are out there, but to get out for safety is the number one priority of the transportation system in the Northwest Territories. We use a number of initiatives to reach out to people in the Northwest Territories and people visiting NWT, as I think and believe the Member talked yesterday in the House about how we’re going to get our message out there, be it Twitter, radio advertising, Facebook, but also on the commercial side of stuff. We have a great working relationship with the transportation companies. I think when something arises, be it around forest fires or those sorts of things, we have direct e-mail with a number of the commercial people as well as being from Hay River, at opportune times when safety is a major concern, we’ve used the electronic sign system on the south lake to warn people of the condition of the road coming north.
Masi. Oral questions. Member for Sahtu.
