Ottawa committed $405 million on Tuesday to advance the Mackenzie Valley Highway, though the money buys one bridge, one access road and the completion of an environmental assessment that has been running since 2013.
Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon and Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Rebecca Alty announced the funding at Norman Wells Airport on Sept. 8, joined by Northwest Territories Deputy Premier Caroline Wawzonek, Sahtu MLA Daniel McNeely and Norman Wells Mayor Frank Pope. The money flows through the federal Arctic Infrastructure Fund, according to CBC News.
Three things get paid for. The first is finishing the environmental assessment and design work for the 321-kilometre stretch between Wrigley and Norman Wells. The second is the Great Bear River Bridge near Tulita, with early work scheduled to begin this winter and construction starting in the summer, CKLB Radio reported. The third is the second phase of the Prohibition Creek Access Road.
That is a genuine start. It is not, yet, a highway. The Government of the Northwest Territories has estimated roughly a decade of construction for the Wrigley to Norman Wells leg alone, and has said the existing winter road would need to stay open for that entire period. The longer vision, an all-season link running about 800 kilometres up the valley to meet the Dempster Highway south of Inuvik, remains further out still.
Most of the coverage of Tuesday’s announcement led with the dollar figure and with Ottawa’s framing of the road as nation-building infrastructure that supports Arctic sovereignty and defence. That framing is accurate. It is also not the reason people in the Sahtu want the road, and the gap between the two is worth closing.
In the summer of 2024, record low water on the Mackenzie River made the channel unnavigable. The Canadian Coast Guard declined to deploy navigational aids, and the resupply barges that carry a year’s worth of fuel and freight into Norman Wells, Tulita and Fort Good Hope did not run. Communities turned to air freight instead. By early October, gasoline and heating fuel in Norman Wells were approaching $5 a litre, and the town council declared a local emergency on humanitarian grounds, with residents describing monthly fuel bills above $5,000. Norman Wells has roughly 700 people.
The territorial government responded by buying the price down. Starting Nov. 16, 2024, it cut the wholesale cost of gasoline in Norman Wells by about $0.75 a litre and the wholesale cost of diesel and home heating fuel by about $0.86 a litre, and put $1.8 million toward offsetting transport costs for businesses, Indigenous governments and community governments across the Sahtu and Beaufort Delta. That is what a failed barge season costs the public, in one region, in one year.
The winter road is the fallback, and it is a shrinking one. It is an ice and snow route that opens later and closes earlier as the North warms, and it is the same corridor the permanent highway would replace. The case for the Mackenzie Valley Highway is not primarily about moving military equipment north. It is about whether a community of a few hundred people can heat itself in a year when the river is too low and the ice comes too late.
The binding constraint now may not be money. The project entered environmental assessment before the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board in 2013, received terms of reference in 2015, and the territorial government submitted its Developer’s Assessment Report in October 2023. Tuesday’s funding is meant to finish that process. Prime Minister Mark Carney, who was born in Fort Smith, N.W.T., referred the project to the federal Major Projects Office in March, and Ottawa has begun the consultation process toward listing it as a project of national interest under the Building Canada Act. What that designation changes in practice, and how quickly, has not been spelled out.
The unanswered question from Tuesday is the total price. Ottawa and the territory previously cost-shared $140 million for assessment and capacity work, and the territorial government has acknowledged that construction estimates have climbed sharply with national cost escalation. No current full-build figure was released with the $405 million.
via CBC News. Additional reporting from CKLB Radio and Cabin Radio.
