Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, like my colleague from the Mackenzie Delta, I, too, today would like to talk on the state of the transportation in the Mackenzie, or the Beaufort-Delta. As someone from McPherson tells you the road is the worst that he’s ever seen, then I think it’s our paying attention.

Mr. Speaker, it is extremely dusty and unsafe driving conditions. As a matter of fact, we had another death on the highway this summer. A father of three was killed while working on the highway. We had a culvert collapse at Caribou Creek. Why did the culvert collapse? Are these things not inspected? Again, luckily nobody was hurt or killed, because it was something that you couldn’t see if you were driving down the road. I got a phone call from a constituent who just happened to be at the scene and it was like 30 feet wide and 20 feet deep and luckily he wasn’t driving, otherwise he would have ended up at the bottom of that culvert. He called me because I had brought up the issue of the state of the road before and he thought I should know. I appreciated that.

We have, Mr. Speaker, an ice making machine that’s supposed to be flooding ice at Tsiigehtchic. It’s sitting at James Creek by the Yukon border. It’s 150 kilometres away. I’m sure they’re not going to be making any ice bridges up there.

Mr. Speaker, you’re getting the picture here that the right side of the brain doesn’t seem to be communicating with the left side of the brain, because we got a marine storage yard sitting right at Tsiigehtchic that this machine could be sitting in. We have industry that’s waiting on both sides of the ice bridge to get to work and the sooner that industry can get their materials up in the Beaufort-Delta and go to work, then the sooner our people can go to work and the sooner our shelves can be restocked again and the prices might start going down.

Industry has committed millions of dollars, Mr. Speaker, into the Beaufort-Delta and we can do our part by making sure that our infrastructure that we’re responsible for is looked after and ready to go. It’s called working together, Mr. Speaker, and maybe it’s a novelty that we’re going to have to try.

We shouldn’t let, Mr. Speaker, personality conflicts get in the way of our commitment to working for what’s good for the people that we represent. This continues to happen, Mr. Speaker. We may have to have a serious look at it and if changes need to be made, then we have to make the changes because, first and foremost, our commitment is to the safety and well-being of the people we represent. Thank you.

---Applause