NWT’s diamond mine winter road moves into new, uncertain era

With one of the NWT’s three diamond mines no longer actively mining, one insolvent and a third in financial difficulty, the future of the winter road connecting those mines to Yellowknife is unclear.

The mines have traditionally managed construction and maintenance of the annual Tibbitt to Contwoyto Winter Road through a joint venture.

Rio Tinto, which owns the Diavik mine, was the lead party in that joint venture until recently.

Now that Diavik has entered closure, De Beers – operator of the Gahcho Kué mine – has assumed administrative and financial oversight of the winter road.

By email this week, De Beers senior communications manager Terry Kruger said “planning has commenced” for the next winter road but it was too early to know much more.

Nuna Det’on Cho, a winter road services joint venture, will hold the contract to build and maintain the winter road through to 2030, Kruger said, and the new director of winter road operations is Howard Nowell, replacing the retiring Barry Henkel.

De Beers did not answer questions about how confident the company is that the money exists to run an effective and safe winter road program this coming winter – or whether there are circumstances in which there might be no winter road at all.

Kruger instead said he had referred those questions to Nowell and been told that the joint venture’s partners were busy confirming haulage plans “to determine the budget and costs for a 2027 winter road.”

Gahcho Kué no longer plans to remain operational beyond 2028 and has laid off some staff as it fights the same economic headwinds that have sent the nearby Ekati mine into insolvency in recent weeks.

Ekati is being propped up by federally backed loans worth up to $235 million. It is losing millions of dollars a month and owner Burgundy is trying to sell it.

Tariffs and escalating fuel costs have been blamed for some of the financial crisis hitting diamond mines, but the rise of diamonds grown in labs has been a major hit to the natural diamond industry. Consumers are able to buy cheaper diamonds that, to many, are identical to those that came from mines.

Privately, some officials associated with past winter roads have expressed concern that the mines’ financial struggles could eventually result in cost-cutting at the expense of safety.

Burgundy has set out a timeline for the sale of Ekati that would conclude in November, before the next winter road season. For Ekati to make a meaningful financial contribution to that winter road, a new owner would have to have access to enough money to both support the road and handle the mine’s many existing debts to industry, Indigenous governments and the federal government.

In the past, officials have said building more than 300 km of winter road across frozen lakes and portages costs $20 million or more per year.

The rationale is that the road remains cheaper and more logistically straightforward than trying to fly in the supplies and heavy equipment on which the mines rely.

The 2026 winter road opened on February 14. The joint venture declared it closed on April 10 after about 3,200 northbound loads – half the traffic the road had carried in most recent years.