The Town of Hay River is setting out an 11-point plan to try to capitalize on military investment coming to the North.
While Yellowknife and Inuvik are each the subject of dedicated Department of National Defence projects worth billions of dollars, other NWT communities don’t have the same certainty around whether money and work will reach them.
When DND recently held a public meeting about its plans in Yellowknife, Hay River sent town manager Glenn Smith, deputy mayor Keith Dohey and former MLA Wally Schumann to represent the town.
“We felt it was important from a town perspective to be there,” Dohey told Cabin Radio early the week after that meeting.
“We were identified in some documents as a potential satellite location for some of the DND projects. We wanted to get up there and get ahead of things before they got too far into the planning, and make sure we were at the table.”
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Dohey said one message in particular gives Hay River hope: no one community appears to have the capacity to take on all of the work DND is proposing.
At a council standing committee meeting on Tuesday evening, the town will put forward a proposal featuring 11 steps to try to ensure some benefits from the DND work come south of Great Slave Lake.
They include positioning Hay River as a “logistics node” in conversations with DND, pushing to revitalize the town’s rail and marine assets in connection with that, and seeing if the new Arctic Infrastructure Fund can help pay for some of those improvements.
The town also wants to bring its chamber of commerce back to life and is planning to brief “key local businesses” on some of the opportunities ahead.
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“We’re developing a strategy. It’s one thing for the town to send some people up there, but we want to see some involvement, obviously, from our local business community,” said Dohey.
“There is a chamber now, but it’s not as active in some of these major conversations as it probably could be.”
The town’s next steps include attending June’s Arctic Development Expo in Inuvik to learn more about DND’s plans while marketing Hay River, plus collaborating with the Yellowknife Chamber of Commerce on a “Hay River familiarization tour.”
The town delegation met with the Yellowknife chamber, DND, the GNWT, Indigenous development groups Det’on Cho and the Tłı̨chǫ Investment Corporation, and the City of Yellowknife over the course of two days before the DND public meeting last month.
“I think everybody understood where we were coming from,” said Dohey.
“We weren’t there trying to step on toes or insert ourselves somewhere we shouldn’t be. We were there in a support role and offering what we can, where we can.
“I think everyone was very open to that, and everyone seems all hands on deck. So it’s exciting stuff.”
