Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, a little follow-up to my questions I asked earlier. You know, as I mentioned the Louis Cardinal, it's pretty clear that the vessel has had its time in the waters; it's time to replace this unit, you know, before we have any incidents. We always have to try to avoid these. Always prepare and make sure we have the proper infrastructure. Will the Minister at least commit to doing a planning study to be prepared in case we do have to replace the unit? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Masi. Minister of Transportation.
As I've said, we use the management tools to have a look at all our assets and stuff moving forward. As far as a planning study goes, the only thing we've been doing so far on there to -- we know where we are for maintenance and where the vessel is at and how much life is left in the vessel. What we continue to do on an ongoing basis to make sure we have adequate capacity for the volumes of traffic that are on that river system, and we continue to say that the data that's coming in that we meet these criteria to service the region, and I don't believe that at this time that I can commit to doing a planning study to replace the Louis Cardinal as we've invested tons of money into it for an ongoing basis and we will continue to monitor it going forward as there's Coast Guard regulations that we have to abide by to service the public, and public safety is our number one concern.
Mr. Speaker, I'd like to ask the Minister: what is the plan for the department if this vessel didn't meet the criteria for the Coast Guard?
If we were to get into a situation where the Louis be serviced in the region, we do have the backup area that the Member alluded to in his Member’s statement that we could probably put in the water and bring into service to meet the emergency needs of that, and then in the long-term, if that was the case, if something drastically happened to the boat, we'd have to look at the long-term plans of how we're going to replace one of these units. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Mr. Speaker, the Minister just said that the Merv Hardie is the backup plan, yet to get it ready to operate, it'll cost $1.5 million. Why would we spend that $1.5 million rather than investing that into a new vessel?
As the Member knows, we have limited funds. We would spend the $1.5 million versus the $10 million it would cost to replace that ferry, and plus in the short time you just don’t go buy a ferry off the shelf. They just don’t have them sitting there at the store to buy. We would have to order this thing. It would probably take a couple of number of years to put into service. So the short-term fix would be to reactivate the Merv Hardie.
Mr. Speaker, that's why I'm asking to do the planning study now, rather than wait till, you know, when we're panicking here. But, Mr. Speaker, will the Minister and the department, you know, start planning ahead and put this into the next bundle for the Building Canada Fund.
I cannot commit to putting it into Bundle 3. As this Legislative Assembly know, ours infrastructure needs across the territory are huge, and I'll say the same thing here I've said at FPT table. We could take every dollar the federal government has put into infrastructure, all three bundles that the government has proposed and this country could spend every dime of it just on upgrading the road system into Canada. So the limited amount of funds the Northwest Territories gets, we have to spread it across the complete territory to meet the needs of all residents.
Masi. Oral questions. Member for Kam Lake.
