MR. SPEAKER: Further petitions?

The hon. the Opposition Leader.

MS JONES: Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I stand today to present a petition on behalf of the people in Labrador. It says:

WHEREAS the Trans-Labrador Highway is a vital transportation lifeline for the Labrador communities, providing access, generating economic activity, and allowing residents to obtain health care and other public services; and

Mr. Speaker, this section of highway - as I have been saying day in, day out in this House of Assembly - is critical to the people of Labrador, it is critical to the people who have to travel that highway right from Labrador West right to Blanc-Sablon. People have to travel there for work, for personal reasons, for a hospital, for all of the things that you require transportation for of goods and services; it all happens over this section of road.

So why is it that the government is not taking seriously the fact that sections of this road desperately need to be repaired? At the very minimum, Mr. Speaker, they need to have crushed stone. At the very minimum, they need to have some resurfacing. That is the bottom line if you are going to expect people to transport over that road for the next number of months.

Mr. Speaker, the ideal thing for people in that area is to have a paved road. Everyone else in the Province who has to travel over a Trans-Canada Highway has a paved Trans-Canada Highway. Well, not in Labrador; our Trans-Canada Highway in Labrador is a gravel road and it is a road that the government is not committing to pave. That is what has people so irate. That and the fact that every day they are hitting potholes, they are losing tires, they are beating up their vehicles trying to get to work, trying to get to a hospital, trying to deliver goods into the communities. That is unacceptable.

Mr. Speaker, this road is going to be critical in more ways than one. Just this last week, the Quebec government announced $300 million over the next five years to complete the road on the Lower North Shore joining the road from Montreal, Quebec City right on into Blanc-Sablon. In five years, we will be able to drive from Labrador directly into that part of the country, yet the government in Newfoundland and Labrador does not see fit to start laying pavement to bring that highway to the standard that it needs to be. Well, that is not good enough. Thousands of people use that road every day - thousands of people. Thousands of people depend upon it and it is not good enough when you have grader operators out there saying: Yes, we have the graders on the road, but you can hardly sit in the machine because you are hitting so many rocks that it is protruding through the gravel road that you are getting jolted. I have talked to grader operators who have been off work with bad necks and bad backs trying to maintain that road because it is in such a deplorable state at this time.