Arctic defence means building Mackenzie Valley Highway, Sahtu says

In the week that Canada issued a major military update, Sahtu leaders are making the case for the Mackenzie Valley Highway as a national defence priority.

Ottawa just committed more than $70 billion to defence over the next two decades, framing its updated defence policy as one that will improve Arctic security and benefit northerners.

The fine detail of what that policy actually means for the NWT isn’t yet available.

However, within hours of the announcement, the Sahtu Secretariat – the land claims organization for the central Mackenzie Valley – had issued a paper setting out national defence grounds for construction of the Mackenzie Valley Highway.

It comes with a video that declares: “Let’s get this done.”

The highway, expected to cost well over $1 billion, would create an all-season road through the heart of the NWT, where currently only a temporary winter road exists during the year’s coldest months.

Communities like Norman Wells have spent years advocating for the road to be built, more recently increasing the volume of those demands as climate shifts disrupt other supply routes like barging.

In the 30 years that the project has been contemplated, some federal funding has arrived for tiny sections of the highway and planning work to move forward, but nothing like the sum needed to get the entire road built.

The project also needs to move through environmental assessment.

The new paper is titled Securing Canada’s Link to the Arctic.

In an introduction, Chair of the Sahtu Secretariat Charles McNeely writes: “To help ensure our defence/security needs in the Arctic, support northern economic development and meet the challenges of natural disaster response, Canada needs a dependable all-weather road through the Northwest Territories.”

McNeely asserts: “Canada needs the Mackenzie Valley Highway.”

The report paints the North’s crumbling infrastructure as a barrier to any meaningful effort to address threats from the likes of China and Russia.

“Canada will have to rely on northern communities to help support more personnel and our defence and security endeavours. To do this, Canada will need to expand and evolve its grossly inadequate transportation and logistical network in the North,” the report states, dismissing the Dempster Highway through the Yukon to Inuvik as “quickly deteriorating.”

While most of the report sets out threats and challenges like Russian and Chinese Arctic interests, the growth of northern sea routes and other countries’ steps to expand their fleets of icebreakers, one section notes an alternative use for an all-season Mackenzie Valley Highway: a means of escaping wildfires.

“For lnuvik and other communities that are only serviced by the Dempster Highway, it is apparent that their supply chain and possible evacuation route depends on whether the Yukon can spare the resources to ensure that it remains open during a natural disaster,” the report states.

“In the case that the Dempster Highway were to be closed due to wildfire or other disaster, lnuvik and other communities would have to be airlifted. This would pose a predicament for the Canadian government.

“The Mackenzie Valley Highway would allow an alternative route that would be maintained by the GNWT through Indigenous contractors.”

The video, meanwhile, documents the high cost of living in the Sahtu, while on-screen graphics illustrate the shrinking size of the winter road and barge seasons.

Canada’s defence policy update didn’t include a specific sum earmarked for northern ground infrastructure of the kind envisaged in the Sahtu Secretariat’s report, though a comparatively small sum – $218 million – is set aside for “northern operational support hubs.” It’s not clear if any of the highway project could qualify for some of that fund.

The highway’s backers may also be encouraged by the words of federal northern affairs minister Dan Vandal who, while not specifically addressing the highway, said on Monday that the defence policy update was “a turning point for Canada, as well as the Arctic.”

“We need to invest rapidly,” he said.

The Sahtu Secretariat’s report returns to address military concerns in its conclusion.

“Russia already has undertaken a mammoth project to militarize the North. Our allies are taking notice and attempting to catch up, and questions are arising as to what Canada’s response will be,” the report states.

“Canada will need to get the Arctic right and developing dependable, year-round infrastructure from the south to the Beaufort coast is the first step.”