‘We are doing our best to accelerate the Mackenzie Valley Highway’

The NWT’s premier says his government is “really working” to make the Mackenzie Valley Highway a reality as the Sahtu stumbles through a chaotic resupply season.

Addressing regional leaders at the Dehcho Annual Assembly on Tuesday, RJ Simpson said his territory needed to have “the infrastructure in place that people in the rest of Canada take for granted.”

The Mackenzie Valley Highway would give the Sahtu region its first all-season road connection to the rest of Canada.

The project, expected to cost well over $1 billion, has been proposed for decades and is currently undergoing environmental assessment, but has never had the federal financial backing it will need to be realized.

“We’re not looking for aerospace manufacturing facilities or anything like that. We’re looking for roads. We need the Mackenzie Valley Highway,” Simpson told Dehcho leaders.

The work would extend a highway that currently ends in the Dehcho region up into Sahtu communities like Tulita and Norman Wells. Those communities have stepped up calls for the highway to be built in recent years as low water levels on the Mackenzie River play havoc with summer barge resupply season. Without an all-season road, the Sahtu must rely on expensive air freight or wait for the short winter road season.

Simpson said his government is pushing for the highway “especially in light of the low water issues that we’re seeing.”

“That’s having impacts on people’s day-to-day lives, filling up your vehicle with fuel, going to the grocery store. If you plan on building a house, well, your building supplies might not be coming up now. These are the real issues that we are facing, and we are doing our best to accelerate the Mackenzie Valley Highway,” Simpson said.

“I want to see real progress on this. It’s been talked about my entire life. I don’t want it to go another generation and another generation beyond that. I want to see some progress. So we’re really working on that.”

‘Our resupply chain is gone’

Some delegates in the room remained skeptical. Tim Lennie, a former chief of the Wrigley-based Pehdzéh Kı̨ First Nation – a community at the end of the existing highway – said there had been “nothing but talk” for the past 20 years.

Lennie noted the territory has already received more than $100 million to start some aspects of work on the Mackenzie Valley Highway, even if that figure is nowhere near the sum needed to actually build it.

He questioned where that money had gone, besides “consultants and lawyers.”

Meanwhile, in the Sahtu, regional MLA Danny McNeely described the extraordinary lengths – and costs – some communities must contemplate to ensure supplies arrive this summer.

Speaking last week from Fort Good Hope, McNeely pointed to the GNWT’s awarding of a $1.5-million contract to Air North to ship automotive gas to the community.

“Doing the math on the inventory hauled, it works out to $3.80 a litre to airlift gasoline from Inuvik to Fort Good Hope. The cost of living is just unbearable,” McNeely told Cabin Radio.

He said a stock of aviation fuel delivered to Norman Wells had been depleted when air tankers had to draw from it to fight the Fort Good Hope wildfire.

“That was replaced on the weekend of July 20, when 84,000 litres got airlifted to Norman Wells,” the MLA said. “The petroleum agency was telling me that the cost per litre was $2.25 and it is now $3.45, which is a 53-percent increase – another factor to the high cost of living. So our resupply chain is gone, totally gone, with the barging.”

At the moment, McNeely said, the proposed GNWT timeline to get the Mackenzie Valley Highway built wouldn’t see it completed until around the year 2037, more than a decade away.

He wants the territory to be “aggressive and optimistic” with that timeline, arguing that getting the road built in the next four to five years is realistic.

In the meantime, McNeely called on the territorial government to “immediately develop a business case and submit that to Ottawa and start lobbying.” He says there hasn’t been an updated business case in years, and he has no idea how close the federal government is to committing the large funding package needed to guarantee the road gets built.

Is the air barge working out?

While politicians talk about the highway, the effects of this summer’s resupply disruption are playing out.

Esker Norman works for Black Spruce Education, a not-for-profit based in Norman Wells that organizes the likes of youth on-the-land programming.

Ordinarily, Black Spruce relies on the summer barge resupply to bring in food and other equipment for its activities.

In the absence of a barge this summer, the organization turned to Buffalo Airways’ “air barge,” a Boeing 737 that the airline said will haul freight to the Sahtu at discounted rates.

While residents have expressed appreciation for that service, Norman said the reality appeared to be that discounted air barge items “weren’t the priority and would be bumped unless you paid the full normal rate.”

He said Black Spruce’s goods awaiting the air barge – the likes of bed frames and furniture for staff housing, and dried goods from the south – “sat and sat and sat, and didn’t come.”

“Goods that we ordered back in June only arrived here within the past week or two,” Norman said last week. “That completely threw off our entire summer. For some things, we ended up just going ahead and paying the full rate for it. We’re a small not-for-profit. We have a limited amount of grant funding that we set aside for our shipping and the barging season not happening completely changed the costs associated with that.”

Larger businesses able to pay any rate can still meet their needs, he said, but smaller outfits and individual residents “are being completely neglected” by the options left with no barge running.

He doesn’t expect any future improvement, either.

“We see no reason why the conditions on the river are going to improve massively in the years ahead.” Norman said. “We’ve certainly lost all trust that the barges will ever run in the same way that they have in the past.”

Sandy Macpherson, Buffalo Airways’ business development manager, is on the other side of the air barge system. By phone on Thursday, he described having already moved three quarters of a million pounds of freight by air to Norman Wells, with another half a million pounds still waiting in the yard.

“I’m used to people calling and saying they’ve got a couple thousand pounds, and now they’re calling with a couple hundred thousand pounds,” Macpherson told Cabin Radio.

Asked how cargo is being prioritized, he acknowledged that goods for customers who pay the full rate generally travel first. Buffalo’s air barge is not being subsidized by any level of government, he added. “It’s 100-percent us. So just bear with us.”

“The air barge program was created to offer the best rate possible, and with that best rate possible comes concessions,” said Macpherson.

“What’s been tough is my front-line staff here, the dispatchers that take the calls and meet the people dropping stuff off, they’re getting frustrated customers saying, ‘I want the 60 cents a pound cheap rate, but I also want it to go as soon as possible.’

“It’s a battle, and our front-line staff is doing amazing.”

Macpherson said everything possible is being done to accommodate as much discounted air barge freight as possible alongside cargo travelling at regular rates.

“The freight is just never-ending,” he said.

“I’ve got half a million pounds in my yard right now, and I know of another 150 to 200 that may show up by the end of the week. We’ll be at least another month moving all that. So yeah, we’ll keep going.”

‘Pass-through’ communities urge scrutiny

Not everyone views the Mackenzie Valley Highway as a straightforward force for good, transformative as it would be for the Sahtu.

In a recent filing, the Fort Liard-based Acho Dene Koe First Nation urged regulators carrying out the highway’s environmental assessment to be wary of the “many adverse impacts” that come with it.

Fort Liard already has an all-season highway link. The community would be on the route from British Columbia to the Mackenzie Valley Highway and so could expect a significant increase in traffic, which it acknowledges would bring some benefits.

However, the First Nation also sees dangers like habitat destruction, land transformation, changes to traditional practices, and increased availability of drugs and alcohol.

The environmental assessment must take into account the impact on the highway’s “pass-through areas” like Fort Liard, the First Nation argued.

“All out-of-territory traffic increases resulting from the Mackenzie Valley Highway will not simply originate in Fort Simpson,” the southernmost community currently within the scope of the assessment, “but instead will flow from British Columbia or Alberta,” the First Nation’s letter to regulators continued.

The letter stated effort “is necessary to ensure that all communities impacted by this development receive appropriate net benefits to accommodate them.”

Addressing the Dehcho Assembly, Simpson alluded to another concern the project must resolve before construction can begin: where, exactly, the highway goes.

Deputy premier Caroline Wawzonek will head to Wrigley next week, he said, partly to address that issue.

“We understand the community has issues with the routing. We want to work with the community. We want the routing to be something the community supports,” Simpson said.

“We don’t just put projects through any more … I’m not trying to sell anybody anything here. I want to work together with people.”

Aastha Sethi contributed reporting.