MR. GRAHAM STEELE: Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. I'm going to take advantage of this most unusual procedure we have in this House to talk for the next 15 minutes or so about a number of issues that are of particular importance in my own constituency of Halifax Fairview, which I've had the honour to serve as a member for the last six years.

I'd like to start by talking about the Glades Lodge, which is a long-term care facility in Halifax Fairview, and after much work by the residents, the residents' families and the staff, very recently we had an announcement from the Department of Health that the Glades Lodge will be replaced - and I want to congratulate all of the people in my constituency who worked very hard in order to obtain that result from the Government of Nova Scotia.

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However, the replacement will not happen for several years and there are some real issues about where they new building is going to be.

Many of the residents of that facility have their families nearby, and if the building is put somewhere out in Dartmouth or somewhere out in Bedford, or Sackville or somewhere equally distant, it's going to cause a great deal of hardship for the families. I would also mention that this facility, which has been in the same place for the last 30 years, also has many staff members who live near the building; in fact there are a couple of apartment buildings nearby where many of the staff members of the Glades Lodge live.

So it really matters to the people of that community where the new building is going to be and unfortunately, partly because of the government's delay in reaching the decisions that were necessary on this, the opportunity to buy some vacant land next door to the existing building came and went. Now it's not clear at all whether in fact that property is going to be available - because that would be the most sensible and logical place for the new building to be.

I have raised this issue in the House a number of times over the last couple of years, in Question Period and otherwise, and I want to assure the Minister of Health that I'm going to continue to raise this issue to make sure there is a satisfactory outcome for the residents, the residents' families, and the staff of the Glades Lodge.

Mr. Speaker, in my constituency as well is Long Lake Provincial Park, something that comes as a surprise to many people who think of my constituency as being exclusively urban. As a matter of fact, I share Long Lake Provincial Park with two of my colleagues, the member for Halifax Atlantic and the member for Timberlea-Prospect. It's a very large park of, I believe, about 2,000 hectares and it was declared a park over 20 years ago. There has been no development of Long Lake Provincial Park because the government of the day declared it to be a park and then promptly consecrated exactly no resources to protecting or developing the park. So over the last 20 years usage of the park has gone on in a rather unstructured way, in some ways that, indeed, are less than desirable from the point of view of the preservation of the natural and heritage values of the park.

Fortunately, Mr. Speaker, there is a dedicated group of park users and park lovers. The Long Lake Provincial Association, who by dint of much effort have persuaded the Department of Natural Resources to develop a management plan for the park. I want to congratulate the Department of Natural Resources for working on that project over the past couple of years - I do not believe it would have happened without the commitment and hard work and the knowledge of the members of the Long Lake Provincial Park Association.

We now have a management plan in draft form. There is still a great deal of work that needs to be done, public consultation. Some of the things that they are proposing would be very exciting, Mr. Speaker, because apart from Point Pleasant Park, this is by far the largest natural protected area near the core of the Halifax Regional Municipality. Because no money

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has been available over the last 20 years to develop the park, it's virtually unknown to the population of the Halifax Regional Municipality - they don't even realize that they have this enormous, beautiful, natural park right in their midst.

So, Mr. Speaker, on behalf of the residents I represent, many of whom live very close to the park boundaries because it is those areas along the park boundaries that are growing by leaps and bounds, on behalf of the residents of the park, the users of the park, people who love the park, I want to let the Minister of Natural Resources know that I am going to continue to press him and his department to do the work that needs to be done to finish that management plan, to devote the resources that are necessary to ensure that the natural and heritage values of that park are preserved and that the people of the Halifax Regional Municipality, and beyond, continue to have this natural gem in their midst.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to talk about an intersection in my constituency. Again, many people who think of my constituency as being exclusively urban don't realize that I have a couple of stretches of provincial highway in my constituency. One goes by the name of Northwest Arm Drive, and it's a very peculiar road because it starts at the top of Main Avenue in Fairview as a continuation of Dunbrack Street, which is the main north-south street in the Clayton Park/Clayton Park West area. It's peculiar because it was built, again in the 1980s, as a kind of super high-speed highway.

It's a beautiful highway, wonderfully paved. It was just repaved within the last couple of years and it's a divided highway, such as we would like to have in many places in Nova Scotia, a beautiful, divided highway, two lanes going in each direction, built for speed. Yet it has essentially become a residential feeder route because, when it was built, at the time it was in the constituency of the Premier of the day, 20 years ago, and he had apparently the grand idea of a major highway going around the edge of town and perhaps crossing over the Northwest Arm and connecting to the south end of the city - hence, the name Northwest Arm Drive.

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One of several peculiar things about Northwest Arm Drive is the name. Of course it's called Northwest Arm Drive, but is nowhere close actually to the Northwest Arm - it is quite a distance away from the Northwest Arm. Apparently the reason for the name is because the original plan was that it would curve around to the south-southeast, and connect to the Northwest Arm, but in a way that we can only marvel at, Mr. Speaker, part of this highway was built and then it just stopped. It just comes to a flat, dead end and you see a sign saying highway ends 1 kilometre, and it does, it just comes to an end at the Old Sambro Road, which is a much smaller, much rougher, much more residential kind of street. So you have this major, high-speed highway that comes down smack to an end, on basically a small, curving, residential street.

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The problem on Northwest Arm Drive, of course, is that because the highway is built for speed, that's exactly how people drive on it. Meanwhile, the area along the eastern edge of Northwest Arm Drive is being highly developed, high-density buildings, new neighbourhoods, more buildings approved by Halifax City Council and going up soon, more and more people, more and more cars coming out of residential neighbourhoods onto this high speed, provincial highway. It's a recipe for trouble and that's exactly what is happening.

There are problems at several of the intersections along this road, but there is a problem at one in particular. Walter Havill Drive, a city street and J. Albert Walker Drive connect to this provincial highway. I'll call it, to keep the name short, the Walter Havill intersection. It is the intersection that is the most dangerous intersection in the western part of the Halifax Regional Municipality, according to accident statistics. You have an intersection that the Department of Transportation and Public Works acknowledges was not built to the highest safety standard and you have cars flying along this high-speed highway, connecting at the Walter Havill intersection, with an increasingly high volume residential street. There are blind curves on the southern side, there is a bridge that blocks the view, a bridge with a dip in the road that blocks the view coming from the north. It's a real problem, Mr. Speaker, there are a lot of collisions there. There has been at least one fatality there.

The Department of Transportation and Public Works knows what the problem is, knows how to fix it and all they need now is the money to do it. It was identified last year by the Department of Transportation and Public Works as one of the priorities for their budget last year, but this government saw fit not to fund it in last year's budget.

So, Mr. Speaker, the residents of that neighbourhood, who take their lives in their hands every time they have to drive through that intersection, and there is only one way in and out of that growing neighbourhood, they're looking to this government to say, will they fund the necessary safety improvements in this year's budget? I want to let the Minister of Transportation and Public Works know that he will continue to hear from me until those safety improvements are made to the Walter Havill intersection.

Mr. Speaker, I want to note as well something that disappeared from my constituency a year and a half ago, a great loss, and that was the West End Ecumenical Food Bank, which was a food bank at which I volunteered every Thursday, to feed the hungry of the west end of Halifax. It covered a very large area, was housed in St. John's Anglican Church at the corner of Dutch Village Road and Joseph Howe Drive in Halifax. Unfortunately, because of the deteriorating condition of that church, the food bank lost its home and had nowhere else to go and has been closed ever since. That certainly doesn't mean that the need has disappeared. The need in the area that I represent is as great as it ever was.

I was pleased to learn just a few days ago, Mr. Speaker, at the annual general meeting of the Food Bank Society, that they are hoping to reopen the food bank at a different location, in Fairview, in June. That is good news and I want to thank the hard-working

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volunteers of the West End Ecumenical Food Bank Society for keeping the idea, the dream, alive, and also to the Fairview Citadel of the Salvation Army, which is going to be the new home of the West End Ecumenical Food Bank in June.

Finally, Mr. Speaker, I would like to pay tribute to the Ghosn family of Halifax. Three siblings have just finished building a new apartment building on Main Avenue in Fairview, with financial assistance from the federal government, the provincial government and their own money. In the time available to me now, I know I don't have the time to tell the story of how this building came to be built.

It is a profoundly moving and emotional story that has to do with the family's history and background, how it was they came to acquire this particular piece of property. But, what the family has done- and by that I'm referring to Jasmine Ghosn, Peter Ghosn and Christine Kahil - what they have done is build an apartment building that is affordable for the people of Halifax and is on the cutting edge environmentally. It is heated entirely with geothermal technology and looking at the building from the outside, you'd never know this was such an environmentally friendly building.

But, we are very pleased in the Fairview neighbourhood to welcome this building, thank the provincial and federal governments for funding this and all I can say is we could use another 10 of these buildings in the area that I represent. We could use another 20, 30 - there's a crying need for safe, clean, affordable housing in Halifax and I want to congratulate those three people I mentioned for making the dream happen.

Those are some of the issues that I'm working on and I look forward to continuing to work on them in this session of the House and beyond. Thank you.