MR. SPEAKER: Further petitions?

The hon. the Leader of the Opposition.

MS JONES: Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

I stand today to present a petition on behalf of the residents of Labrador with regard to the Trans-Labrador Highway.

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, you cannot imagine how frustrating it is for the people who live in this part of our Province, the people who every day are using the Trans-Labrador Highway to commute from community to community to bring all the goods and services into Labrador from the Island portion of the Province. Mr. Speaker, they have to use that particular highway connection. For many of the truckers that I have talked to, it has been nothing only an extreme nightmare. An absolute nightmare. They constantly have to replace parts and do repairs on their trucks in trying to truck goods and freight into Southern Labrador, and into Central Labrador, in particular. It has been an absolute nightmare for them.

In fact, this morning I even talked to a reporter in Labrador who was telling me that only a couple of weeks ago they made the drive from Blanc-Sablon up to Goose Bay. It took them fourteen hours on that drive. There were sections of road they could not go any more than twenty kilometres per hour; on most sections of the road. The road was just so bad that that was how long it took. Mr. Speaker, this is a six hour drive. It is a six to seven hour drive for most people on a normal road, and it is taking fourteen hours in some cases for people, which is absolutely ridiculous. People are asking the government to do something, and they are asking them to do something immediately. They need to put some crushed stone on that road. They need to get the road graded up properly. We are getting into one of our peak travel periods in Labrador right now.

Mr. Speaker, last year, I think it was like 100,000 people who used the Apollo on the Strait of Belle Isle; that was more than who used the Ericson on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. This is the kind of traffic that is coming in and out of Labrador. You have to take very seriously the fact that people need to have a standard of road that they can drive on, that is safe, that is acceptable to the kind of transport they need to use it for. It is not a road, Mr. Speaker, so that people can just drive around at their leisure. We are not talking Sunday drivers here. We are talking about people who commute from community to community to go to work. For example, if you look at the shrimp plant in Charlottetown in one community; all the communities around that area commute there by road to go to work. They have to drive over that every single day, every day, and every night to get home.