The next 15 years will see the military footprint at Inuvik’s airport expand to 15 times its current size as the Department of National Defence pours billions of dollars into upgrades.
That was one headline from presentations made by DND officials this week to town councillors and at a public meeting, a month after Prime Minister Mark Carney formalized a $35-billion Arctic sovereignty spending push.
Similar presentations have been made by other DND representatives in Yellowknife, where a public meeting about plans for the territorial capital takes place at the Explorer Hotel on Thursday evening.
There are plenty of similarities between the approaches being taken in the two communities.
An Indigenous participation plan for local businesses and individuals, a need for hangar space to serve all sizes of Canadian military aircraft, and a need to upgrade water and power infrastructure are common to both sites.
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Work in Inuvik is already advancing because of the runway extension project that is already years old and will be key to upgrading the airport’s military capabilities.
Overlaying an image of the entire town of Inuvik onto the airport to hammer home his point about scale, LCol Rob Knapik – the project director for the Inuvik work – said DND will expand its airport presence from 15 to 225 hectares of land.
New hangars will be joined by an operations facility, new aprons and taxiways, upgraded airport lighting, accommodation, a dining area, a medical facility and a munitions storage area, all requirements that are part of Yellowknife’s plan, too.
“We’ll need a lot more power and utilities, because they’re just truck-in, truck-out right now, and we’re going to need about 10 megawatts of power,” Knapik said.
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“Sewer and water is yet to be determined. The town has given us a feasibility study, which we will fund under a separate program.”
Like Yellowknife, the Inuvik project is targeting 2030 for construction to begin and 2040 for the military installation to be fully operational.
‘No plan of permanent presence’
Col Pat Dubé of the Royal Canadian Air Force said the current presence at the airport is “very modest” and has to be expanded to hold the likes of new F-35 fighter jets that Canada will seek to deploy to Inuvik as a “priority” forward operating location serving the Arctic.
“We really need to expand our capacity at these locations to sustain a much larger force,” Dubé said.
However, that does not necessarily mean a transformative influx of military personnel as residents of Inuvik. While DND is upgrading the town’s existing forward operating location, it isn’t currently envisaged as a military base in the sense of a place to which large numbers of people might move for years at a time.
“At this time, there’s no plan of permanent presence,” said Dubé.
“I wouldn’t say that couldn’t change in the future … but for this project, there’s no plan to have permanent presence in the town.”
Instead, the armed forces would rely on Inuvik as a staging post when deploying forces to the Arctic, for example in response to a perceived threat. When the threat ends, those forces would return to their home bases.
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Dubé said he hopes planned utility upgrades at the airport will have benefits for civilians, too.
“There’ll be collateral effects that will upgrade and help out the airport to make it more attractive for businesses,” he said.
“If we can figure out the power, the water and the sewer and the natural gas, it makes it that much more enticing for other businesses to come to the airport.
“We have a proposal coming from the NWT Power Corporation, and we will pay to upgrade whatever needs to be upgraded in order that we get our power.”
Chris Middleton, DND’s acting project manager, said the work is at a very early stage.
“My job is to try and figure out how it is going to be delivered,” he said, “and there’s still a lot of details outstanding for me to be able to do that.”
Middleton added that DND will seek input from residents and Indigenous rights holders “to tell us more about the lands, because we realize and accept that there’s a lot we do not know – and we don’t know what we don’t know.”
He urged local businesses to start acquiring the security clearances that will be necessary to earn work on the project, saying he hopes to “maximize the local capacity before going external,” and noted that despite the stated 15-year timeline, the project team aims to quickly advance.
“It has been made very clear to us from the Government of Canada that this is to be done with some urgency,” Middleton said.
“The threat doesn’t wait for us to get our act together, so we’re trying to move as quickly as possible.”
