MR. SPEAKER: The hon. the Member for the District of Cartwright-L’Anse au Clair and Opposition Leader.

MS JONES: Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I rise today to present a petition on behalf of people in the area from Labrador Straits to Happy Valley-Goose Bay with regard to the Trans-Labrador Highway. I will read it into the Order Paper.

To the hon. House of Assembly of the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador in Parliament Assembled, the petition of the undersigned residents humbly sheweth:

WHEREAS the residents of Red Bay to Goose Bay use a section of the Trans-Labrador Highway that is unpaved and in poor condition; and

WHEREAS this road is no longer suitable for the traffic volumes that travel this route; and

WHEREAS government will not commit to provide funding to even begin paving for Phase II and Phase III of the Trans-Labrador Highway; and

WHEREAS the residents of this region deserve a similar standard of road as the Island portion of the Province;

WHEREUPON the petitioners ask the House of Assembly to call upon government to provide funding to pave the road from Red Bay to Goose Bay;

As in duty bound your petitioners will ever pray.

Mr. Speaker, I have a lot of petitions from communities all over Labrador. I will be presenting those every day in the House of Assembly. The reason for that is, Mr. Speaker, not only is there an extreme need to pave that section of road and for government to start putting together an actual strategy to lobby for the funding to do that, but today there are sections of that road that is in very deplorable condition.

In fact, for the last number of weekends, as most members, I go to my district and most of it I am spending on the road travelling from community to community. I can tell you that I have never seen the road in as bad a condition in all the years that I have been driving it, as I did in the last couple of weeks.

Mr. Speaker, the whole section between about thirty, forty kilometres outside of Red Bay right up to Mary’s Harbour is absolutely disgraceful. It is so bad that I even had people calling me from Mount Pearl this weekend who were up in Labrador on business and called because they could not believe, Mr. Speaker, that the road was just so bad in that area. They said they wanted to call because they did not know if anyone in the Province actually realized how bad this section of road is right now. There is nothing only potholes that stretches for about eighty kilometres.

I talked to the operators who actually do the grading on the road and they themselves told me that they are doing themselves physical harm because they are operating these graders, and the blades are actually digging into the bedrock and they are getting these jolts on the equipment. There is no crushed stone left on a lot of sections of this road. In fact, most of the section I am talking about is ten, twelve years old, Mr. Speaker, and it has not been resurfaced since the time it has been in operation. Right now, we have probably three times more tractor-trailer traffic even now than we have ever had on those sections of road, and it is having a toll. I know that government is spending money there. I am not saying that. I know that they are spending money on completing the section of road that is there and doing other upgrades, but you have to realize –

MR. SPEAKER: Order, please!

MS JONES: - that there is a section right now that desperately needs to have some work done on it and you just cannot ignore that when you have 20,000 people in Labrador –

MR. SPEAKER: Order, please!