Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions today will be for the Minister of Transportation. I know the Minister, before Christmas, got an opportunity to go on the winter roads. I’m glad that he went early, because from what I’m hearing the roads are in rougher shape now than they were back then.
My first question is does the Department of Transportation have a fixed budget on winter road construction and maintenance?
Thank you, Mr. Bouchard. The Minister of Transportation, Mr. Beaulieu.
Yes, Mr. Speaker, we do. At about five-year blocks we tender the winter road construction in several zones. We have seven zones and each zone could be divided up into two zones, or sometimes it’s just one zone. Then we determine right from Wrigley all the way to Colville Lake who would do what and we tender the work. We issue the work based on tender and a schedule that the contractor has to follow.
The next question I have is how does the department know that there’s going to be a set amount? If there are 10 snowstorms versus 15 snowstorms in a year or whether we have no snow in one area or lots of snow, how does the department set that as a fix? Does the department ever come back to the Assembly for additional funds to improve the maintenance on those highways?
We do a best guesstimate we can to determine how many times the passes would be needed by the equipment on the winter road. We also have a lot of historical data, and we use those recognizing that, of course, in the past we’ve also had some support from industry that is no longer there.
I did hear that comment from the Minister in the media a while ago about the lack of industry support this year, but this government has been around for a long time, and I know industry is not there that much this year in the Sahtu especially, so they haven’t been beating up the road as much. But the roads are in terrible shape right now.
Is the Minister looking to put more money and more cycles into the maintenance of the highways?
We are going to take a serious look at the possibility of adding more cycles. Although the industry didn’t support us to the full magnitude that they’ve assisted us in the past, we did get some money from industry. Actually, $140,000 to help us with some of the heavy traffic that they were hoping to bring over the winter roads. We’ve had a lot of complaints about the winter road from industry, people moving some fuel and so on into the communities, and from the general population and from the Sahtu, so we are actually seriously considering requesting some money for the winter road in the Sahtu.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Bouchard.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I know the Minister has been getting these reports. I’ve been getting some of the reports on there. Industry has been keen on letting them know where the maintenance needs to be done. I know in the next little while we’re going to be looking at supplementary expenditures. The roads are melting. The weather is going to be starting to warm up here. We know there is going to be more pressure.
When will the Minister give us some indication that they’re going to increase the cycles and look for money in maintenance?
We don’t anticipate any issues with getting everything that we need into the Sahtu communities with the current state of the winter roads. What we would like to do is, really, use this year where we recognize that we didn’t get industry support as a bit of a prototype year on what happened, what occurred and so on. Then next year look at what we think we need, how we need additional cycles and so on in the Sahtu. By additional cycles I mean the extra grading that’s going to be required on the snowfalls in the Sahtu. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. The Member for Nahendeh, Mr. Menicoche.
