The tab to fix rural roads in the North Peace is quickly nearing $1 billion, but the region is having little luck securing an increase in provincial funding.
Jackie Kjos, who helms the rural roads task force for the Peace River Regional District, gave the board an update Thursday in which she shared few successes and listed the many challenges that threaten to cut off communities and shut down industry.
article continues below
Trending Stories
“Our roads are way worse in 2020 than they were in 2018,” Kjos said.
The state of the roads have caused recent havoc for business, according to Kjos.
Canfor’s sawmill in Fort St. John came within three days of shutting down because of a rural road slide in the Graham and Upper Halfway area.
In Upper Cache, a large canola operation couldn’t ship out a time-sensitive load due to road bans, and a buffalo rancher spun out in an accident that killed half a dozen calves at $2,000 a head.
Road bans this year have lasted 104 days — the fourth longest stretch in 40 years, Kjos said.
“There’s real economic impacts that are hitting not just people in the rural area, but the communities that are supported,” Kjos said.
The good news is that the region’s $20 million budget for rural roads hasn’t been touched while others in the province have seen annual cuts of up to 20%.
The bad news is there are up to 400 kilometres of rural roads that need to be brought up to standard — at a cost of about $1 million per kilometre.
And that’s not including the cost to repair any slides.
The cost to fix Farrell Creek hill alone is $100 million, while there are seven slides threatening the Upper Halfway road, Kjos said.
“Any one that can go at any time,” Kjos said. “There’s 900 people, 6,000 loads of Canfor’s wood back there. It is catastrophic what would happen if we lose one of those roads that are the only access like that.”
Key corridors like Beryl Prairie, Aitken Creek, and Golata Creek “have fallen apart,” Kjos said.
Three-quarters of permitted extraordinary loads hauled in B.C. are in the northeast. And road conditions are expected to get worse as the province ramps up plans to reclaim dormant and orphan wells, up to 625 per year.
On top of it all, there has been a revolving door of district managers at the Ministry of Transportation — the Peace region is now on its fourth manager in three years. And the task force only gets a short lobbying window of five minutes when meeting with ministers and their deputies.
“We’ve been playing pretty nice,” Kjos said. “We might need to apply a little more pressure.”
The task force relaunched in 2017 after it was first established in 1997 to lobby for more rural roads funding. In 1998, the region got $11 million; in 1999, $6.5 million; and later $103 million. But times have changed, and getting any significant new dollars has been a hard sell, Kjos said.
“The economics were different at that time,” Kjos said. “We were pulling in between $1.6 to $1.8 billion a year in oil and gas, so it was quite easy to build a business case — very difficult in this environment to build a business case, even before COVID-19 came along.”
Tumbler Ridge Mayor Keith Bertrand suggested increasing enforcement to keep industry accountable for damaging the roads by overloading their trucks.
“I can tell you from personal experience, not all loads are 100%, and a lot of the deterioration of those roads is because of overweight loads,” Bertrand said.
Kjos said she was reluctant to step in between the ministry and its relationships with contractors and CVSE.
“It’s a bit of a double-edged sword,” Kjos said. “Our goals are no different than the ministry of transportation’s, in that we want a healthy industry but we want to protect the roads, so the person who lives on the road and drives a minivan can get to town.”
Kjos presented a 10-minute video on the state of local roads at the meeting as part of her lobbying efforts. In it, the region’s clay soils are compared to peanut butter when thawing or wet.
Bertrand suggested Kjos include pictures of a fracking convoy.
“Meeting it on the road, it’s quite intimidating, especially on a rural road,” he said. “That might be a challenging task, to get a capture of a convoy, but it’s a pretty impressive sight and I’m sure Victoria has no idea.”
Director Tony Zabinsky, a councillor from Fort St. John, noted concerns about the region’s dwindling aggregate supply, largely being taken up by BC Hydro for the Site C dam.
“We’re finding that small gravel pits are already being used to their full capacity,” Zabinsky said.
“It’s going to affect the rural roads and building these things … If we got to bring in aggregate from another region the trucking costs are going to be astronomical.”
Kjos said that is part of her workplan. Local gravel supply is critical for the long-term.
“We’re questioning where gravel is being allocated this year, in particular where we got some roads that you’re bottoming out with a four-wheel drive and it hasn’t made the list. There’s a few of those we’re concerned about,” she said.
Kjos did note that the task force has seen some success in getting more pullouts built, and that a community meeting with Director Karen Goodings helped to bring improvements to the Milligan-Peejay road, which was in “terrible shape’ in early 2019. A planned $100,000 spend for pothole repair turned into $4 million of pavement overlay, she noted.
“That was a gain of $3.9 million, which we were pretty happy on achieving,” Kjos said.
Goodings suggested a meeting with the premier would go a long way to highlight the region’s problems.
The board must get the province “to understand how important the roads are to economy of our area,” Goodings said, “and to make sure to get that message out that we’re in fact prepared to boost the economy if the province would be prepared to help us out with some funding.”
— with files from Matt Preprost and Tom Summer
Email Managing Editor Matt Preprost at tsummer@ahnfsj.ca
OTTAWA – The parliamentary budget officer says the federal government likely failed to keep its deficit below its promised $40 billion cap in the last fiscal year.
However the PBO also projects in its latest economic and fiscal outlook today that weak economic growth this year will begin to rebound in 2025.
The budget watchdog estimates in its report that the federal government posted a $46.8 billion deficit for the 2023-24 fiscal year.
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland pledged a year ago to keep the deficit capped at $40 billion and in her spring budget said the deficit for 2023-24 stayed in line with that promise.
The final tally of the last year’s deficit will be confirmed when the government publishes its annual public accounts report this fall.
The PBO says economic growth will remain tepid this year but will rebound in 2025 as the Bank of Canada’s interest rate cuts stimulate spending and business investment.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.
OTTAWA – Statistics Canada says the level of food insecurity increased in 2022 as inflation hit peak levels.
In a report using data from the Canadian community health survey, the agency says 15.6 per cent of households experienced some level of food insecurity in 2022 after being relatively stable from 2017 to 2021.
The reading was up from 9.6 per cent in 2017 and 11.6 per cent in 2018.
Statistics Canada says the prevalence of household food insecurity was slightly lower and stable during the pandemic years as it fell to 8.5 per cent in the fall of 2020 and 9.1 per cent in 2021.
In addition to an increase in the prevalence of food insecurity in 2022, the agency says there was an increase in the severity as more households reported moderate or severe food insecurity.
It also noted an increase in the number of Canadians living in moderately or severely food insecure households was also seen in the Canadian income survey data collected in the first half of 2023.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct 16, 2024.
OTTAWA – Statistics Canada says manufacturing sales in August fell to their lowest level since January 2022 as sales in the primary metal and petroleum and coal product subsectors fell.
The agency says manufacturing sales fell 1.3 per cent to $69.4 billion in August, after rising 1.1 per cent in July.
The drop came as sales in the primary metal subsector dropped 6.4 per cent to $5.3 billion in August, on lower prices and lower volumes.
Sales in the petroleum and coal product subsector fell 3.7 per cent to $7.8 billion in August on lower prices.
Meanwhile, sales of aerospace products and parts rose 7.3 per cent to $2.7 billion in August and wood product sales increased 3.8 per cent to $3.1 billion.
Overall manufacturing sales in constant dollars fell 0.8 per cent in August.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 16, 2024.
