Ottawa moves MVH, Grays Bay toward ‘national interest’ status

The Mackenzie Valley Highway and Grays Bay Port and Road are among the first set to be declared Canadian “projects of national interest,” Ottawa confirmed on Wednesday.

Details of the Mackenzie Valley Highway’s imminent listing had emerged on Tuesday. A nuclear waste management project in northwestern Ontario is also set to be listed.

The national interest designation, introduced in the Mark Carney government’s Building Canada Act, clears the way for many federal regulatory processes to be condensed “to get major projects built faster.”

Ottawa framed Wednesday’s confirmation of the news as the initiation of a process, with formal consultation ahead before the designation is formalized. Even so, ministers called it a major milestone.

NWT Premier RJ Simpson has said he believes the Mackenzie Valley Highway, an all-season road from Wrigley to Inuvik that would mark the territory’s first year-round road up its spine, can be completed in the next five years.

It will replace a winter road that forms, with summer barges, the only current means of supplying communities in the Sahtu.

Consultation with Indigenous governments along the route “will begin over the coming weeks,” the federal government stated in a news release. Three Indigenous governments have already signed an agreement to work together on the highway, though they have made clear that does not constitute final approval.

NWT MP and federal cabinet member Rebecca Alty said this summer will bring “targeted highway resurfacing” along the existing route leading up to the Mackenzie Valley Highway, alongside planning and engineering work.

Fort Good Hope groups oppose fast-tracking

The NWT government has said any fast-tracking will respect “Indigenous rights, environmental protections and the Northwest Territories’ treaty-based regulatory system,” though critics like the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society have questioned the impact of streamlined processes on fragile Arctic ecosystems.

While Premier RJ Simpson said on Wednesday that the NWT’s “robust” regulatory system would still apply, the Fort Good Hope-based Yamoga Land Corporation and Fort Good Hope Métis Nation issued a joint press release while the federal news conference was ongoing, expressing opposition to any fast-tracking.

“A highway through the K’asho Got’ine District will severely impact our rights,” Yamoga Lands
Corporation President Joseph Tobac was quoted as saying.

“It takes time, information, and resources to properly assess such a massive project and determine what the impacts will be. To date we have received no concrete information from government on the new highway proposal.”

“Obviously, we’re going to follow up” with the Fort Good Hope groups, NWT major projects minister Caroline Wawzonek said.

Federal energy minister Tim Hodgson said the proposed fast-tracking means that once the consultation around the listing is complete, the political decision on the project will arrive early in the process so that “you know you can build.”

“That gives people the incentive to spend the time, the energy and the money, and quite frankly doesn’t waste Indigenous peoples’ time working on things only to find out at the end of the process that it’s not going forward,” Hodgson said.

“This is a way to create greater certainty … and this is a practical way for how we will get big things built.”

The Grays Bay Port and Road project is the Nunavut side of the larger Arctic Corridor, which would connect the NWT to the Nunavut coast.

The federal government calls it Canada’s first overland connection to an Arctic Ocean deepwater port.

Alty said listing the two northern projects was part of a “larger effort to build up a region that has too often been overlooked.”

This week brings a glut of federal announcements involving the NWT, in part because energy and mines ministers from across the country are meeting in Yellowknife until Friday.