NWT says it’s ‘now or never’ for big projects as northern cities team up

The moment has arrived to make huge investments in northern infrastructure that have been talked about her entire life, NWT industry minister Caitlin Cleveland told Canadian and Arctic leaders on Wednesday.

Describing a “very painful circle” of chasing funding and preparing business cases, Cleveland told Toronto’s Arctic 360 conference “it feels like it’s now or never” in the current geopolitical environment.

“You need to do all the explorations and cross all the ‘t’s and dot all the ‘i’s, and I’ll bet you that back when we built the Trans-Canada Highway, we weren’t doing that. We just knew that it needed to get done – and that’s where we are with the North,” the minister told former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole during a panel about collaboration on defence spending.

“We’ve been talking about it for my whole lifetime. I don’t want my own kids talking about this when I am 70. I want this infrastructure to be there. I want it to be built. And our kids actually rely on this infrastructure to be built in the North, to be properly resourced and properly ready for tomorrow’s world,” Cleveland said.

“We have a point in time right now where we either invest in the North today, when we still have time to do the investment we need to make, or we’re behind the goalpost.”

An advance procurement notice issued on behalf of the Department of National Defence last month suggests spending of some $10 billion is coming to Yellowknife and Inuvik over the next 15 years, though the details remain unclear.

An announcement is expected soon – possibly in the coming release of Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy – to clarify what some of that money will deliver.

More broadly, the NWT is one of the few jurisdictions with no project earmarked as a top-tier priority of Mark Carney’s new Major Projects Office, a fact Cleveland underlined during Wednesday’s Arctic 360 appearance.

The territorial government wants a major hydro expansion, an all-season highway through the heart of the NWT and a highway connecting it to Nunavut’s Arctic coast, projects that taken together now appear to cost $10 billion or more. None can happen without federal backing.

“We’re talking to the prime minister, talking to the Major Projects Office, we’re talking to Canada Infrastructure Bank. We are even talking to other provinces to make sure they understand the opportunities that exist for them from our strategic infrastructure investments,” said Cleveland.

“And in addition to that, we’re not just going around painting the picture for everybody else. We’re still moving these projects forward. For example, the McKenzie Valley Highway is currently in environmental assessment, so we’re still doing all the work that needs to be done.

“There are steering committees for each of these projects that have the GNWT as one partner at the table … and that is how life works in the Northwest Territories, we are sitting on our team with Indigenous governments and making sure that we’re all working together.”

Northern capitals signing MOU

Cleveland appeared on a panel containing Commodore Matthew Coates, Director General Readiness at Canadian Joint Operations Command. She said insights into defence spending plans “give me a lot of hope.”

That panel took place as city councillors back in Yellowknife met to discuss a memorandum of understanding the territorial capital is set to sign with Whitehorse and Iqaluit over Arctic security spending.

In a briefing note for council, the memo was described as supporting “a unified northern municipal voice when engaging with the Government of Canada, Canadian Armed Forces, Norad, and other federal and territorial partners.”

“It is meant to just bring a greater voice to municipalities, particularly capital municipalities, in this larger conversation that is unfolding,” Yellowknife city manager Stephen Van Dine told councillors.

He said Whitehorse and Iqaluit recently passed a similar resolution.

The memo creates “some more formal bonds and ties between all of our municipalities” regarding advocacy for infrastructure spending, Mayor of Yellowknife Ben Hendriksen added. The document will be formally signed at an Arctic Summit in Whitehorse later this month.

Coates said his defence team went to the North 12 times last year and met about 80 different groups “to understand as much as we can about what’s there, who the people are, what their interests are, and get to know the relationships.”

He sought to portray the coming northern defence expansion as one trying to incorporate northern knowledge as a priority.

“To some extent, how we shape our requirements was not started in an office room trying to figure out how many tanks or how many planes need to go from place A to point B,” he said.

“We have predominantly not conducted operations 365 days a year of any variety in the North, and so we need to get smarter on how to do that. We need to leverage the experiences of those that are in the North, the companies that are working successfully in the North.

“It was only at the end of last year that we brought representatives from inside the Department of National Defence together to really start to put down what we had done in order to then push out that military planning aspect of it.”

Cleveland added she hoped a new defence presence in the North might come with new approaches that help northerners fully grasp opportunities for work.

“If we want people to be able to participate, we’re also going to have to change our expectation as to who participates and how and when,” the minister said.

“There’s things like people in the North who are really working hard to go through their own healing journey, and if they are not able to be part of this project because they can’t pass a security clearance – that gets up to the very top of a security level to go and clear brush – how can we make sure they can still participate if they’re carrying along something from 20, 30 years ago?

“Do we have to have a ‘one size fits all’ for every part of these projects? I don’t think we do.”