Want to meet your Nato quota? Build us a highway, NWT tells Canada

The NWT government is pitching the $1 billion-plus Mackenzie Valley Highway as one way to up Canada’s defence spending in line with Nato requirements.

Members of Nato, a 32-nation military alliance spanning Europe and North America, have each committed to spending two percent of their annual gross domestic product on defence.

Canada isn’t meeting that target, and the country has come in for persistent criticism from allies. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has now pledged Canada will increase its military spending to hit that figure.

What counts as defence spending, though? How about an all-season highway connecting the communities of the Sahtu to the rest of the world by road?

“As a Nato partner, Canada is committed to meeting a two-percent target for expenditures and we are well below that right now,” NWT Premier RJ Simpson told Cabin Radio on Wednesday.

“I think there’s a great opportunity for things like the Mackenzie Valley Highway and Slave Geological Province road to fall under that two percent. Those are nation-building projects that also add to Arctic security and national security.”

The territory’s argument is that strengthening northern infrastructure will make the North easier to defend and enhance Canada’s military capabilities in the region.

Canada has also just committed hundreds millions of dollars in northern spending through a broad update to its defence policy earlier this year, though still not the sum needed to build the Mackenzie Valley Highway, which has been a goal of successive NWT governments for decades.

The Mackenzie Valley Highway project is going through an environmental assessment, a necessary step that must be completed before the road can be built, whether or not the funding arrives.

The latest timeline provided by regulators suggests that assessment could be complete by mid-2025.

Documents filed with regulators by the GNWT this summer suggest the territory will try to build the highway over three to four years, using multiple crews working from different starting points at the same time, if the project goes ahead.

That would mean, for example, building the Tulita-Norman Wells stretch of the highway by having crews start in Tulita and in Norman Wells and work toward each other simultaneously.

The GNWT says that’s necessary because “given recent logistical challenges associated with forest fires, low water conditions on the Mackenzie River and subsequent disruption of critical community resupply operations over the past two years, there is an urgent need for all-season access” to the Sahtu.

But in the same document, the territorial government admits many factors govern when the work could actually start.

First, the project has to come through environmental assessment and find funding. Land tenure needs to be secured, a finalized design put in place, permitting received for the work, and procurement carried out.

Overall, some 275 km of road needs to be built for Norman Wells to be connected to Wrigley and the south. Once complete, the highway’s overall length would be 321 km between the two communities.

The territory has also outlined what is effectively a plan B, in which not much funding is received but there’s enough to start work. (A version of this plan has already been taking place, through occasional bridge work or road expansions around communities.)

The GNWT says it’s possible to build the road by biting off chunks of up to 20 km each year, but that approach is expected to take 20 years or more, meaning no completed all-season road for the Sahtu until the 2040s or even 2050s.

NWT MP Michael McLeod wrote to his own Liberal government last month, urging Trudeau to invest in the road as “the North faces the realities of climate change first-hand, seeing shorter winters and lower water levels.”

“A climate crisis point has been reached and it is now time to commit to the construction of an extension to the Mackenzie Valley Highway,” McLeod told Trudeau, advising the prime minister that the highway “should be one of the federal government’s top infrastructure priorities.”

Adopting the same stance as Simpson, McLeod added the highway “will be crucial to Canada’s Arctic sovereignty and defence operations,” as well as helping local economic development and opening up access to natural resources.

‘We’re letting them know’

It’s not yet clear if the federal government sees the Mackenzie Valley Highway as a route to a two-percent Nato spend.

“Those are the conversations we need to have,” Simpson said on Wednesday, speaking at the conclusion of a meeting of Canada’s premiers in Halifax.

“I am putting it out there. We’re letting them know that that’s the way we see it, and I look forward to discussions with them to dig deeper into that subject.”

The NWT ought to be able to rely on Alberta to back it up in that conversation with Ottawa.

The territory has just signed an economic corridors deal with its southern neighbour, in which the two committed to working together on infrastructure, including in their dealings with Ottawa.

That deal has received some pushback in the NWT. Yellowknife resident Charles Davison, writing to newspaper group NNSL after Cabin Radio reported on the agreement, questioned whether this would mean the NWT was now duty-bound to back up “the visceral and unproductive hatred of the present Alberta government for all things Ottawa.”

“It’s about our shared priorities with Alberta,” said Simpson on Wednesday, addressing that concern.

“Of course, we are going to have disagreements with every jurisdiction. We have disagreements within our own jurisdiction.

“And so we want to make sure that when we do go to Ottawa and we are supporting Alberta, it is a shared priority and it is something that is going to benefit both jurisdictions.”