Marci cho, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I have questions for the Minister of Transportation on his Minister's statement. As we are proposing more P3 projects adding Slave Geological to the previous P3 proposal for a Whati road, I would like to ask the Minister if there is any indication on when the P3 approval of the Whati road would occur? Thank you.
Masi. Minister of Transportation.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As we have announced in this House, the federal government has made a commitment to the Whati-Tlicho all-season road. We are working on a number of initiatives within the Department of Transportation presently. One of them is to get through the environmental assessment process with the Mackenzie Valley Environment Impact Review Board. That was brought forward in July of the past year. We continue to work on that. The next step on that process is we need to draft an adequacy statement response that satisfies the requirements of the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board. We will do that, and we will continue to move it through the regulatory process for now. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
I asked the Minister if there is any indication on when the P3 portion of the Whati road may be approved?
All that is probably going to depend on what is going to happen with the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board. We have no control over what they are doing. The other thing that we are looking at doing is we are going to put out a request for qualifications on this process for this road. That should be coming out shortly. We don't want to get ahead of the environmental process.
I would like to ask the Minister why we are not going after the National Infrastructure Fund for the Slave Geological Province road?
We haven't totally decided that right now. As I said in my statement today, we are doing a P3 business case assessment on the corridor of the Slave Geological Province. When this business case is completed, which we are hoping to have done by mid2017, this will give us a better idea how to make a decision on how we move this process forward. It is going to give us a little better idea on the cost of construction of the road, as well as determine the appropriate funding model, and that is what we will determine at the end of that.
Masi. Oral questions. Member for Tu NedheWiilideh.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I'd like to ask the Minister a very similar question to my last question, and that is: why are we proposing a P3 as opposed to going straight to the National Infrastructure Fund? The National Infrastructure Fund, if approved, would be 75 per cent funded by the federal government. Also, it would be something of national significance because, eventually, Slave Geological Road could end up joining up with something from the Port Road of Nunavut, so it is definitely significant nationally. I was wondering why they don't move to the National Infrastructure Fund first, before attempting P3? Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The reason we are doing the P3 business case, as I've said, moving forward is it is going to give us a better idea on construction costs on the construction of this road now that the route has been determined, which took a number of years to get that figured out. This is just going to give us a better idea of costing of the project. Once that is done, then we will probably sit down, no different from the Whati road, and see which makes the best case; national infrastructure process, which is the federal government hasn't clearly laid out the rules around that yet, or a P3 business case. We will determine that and probably have that conversation with committee as we move forward.
Masi. Oral questions. Member for Nahendeh.
