Conservatives, thunder stolen, rely on growing northern impatience

Conservative shadow cabinet members touring the NWT this month are focused on whether the Liberal government delivers.

Bob Zimmer, the shadow minister for Arctic affairs and Canadian northern economic development, led a visit to Inuvik, Tuktoyaktuk and Yellowknife with six fellow shadow cabinet members: John Barlow (agriculture), Dave Epp (rural development), Leslyn Lewis (digital government and AI), Billy Morin (Indigenous services), Lianne Rood (question period coordinator) and Jamie Schmale (Crown-Indigenous relations).

The group visited the Yellowknife headquarters of Joint Task Force North alongside institutions ranging from Bullocks Bistro to Buffalo Airways, then toured Inuvik’s forward operating location and runway development project and stores in Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk.

While Zimmer said it was good for colleagues to “see first-hand” the NWT, he also acknowledged Prime Minister Mark Carney is pursuing a northern platform much of which, on paper, Conservatives support: more defence investment in the North and big infrastructure projects being advanced.

Zimmer suggested northern voters will grow impatient waiting for a Liberal government to deliver on those promises, and said a Conservative government would do more to advance resource development in the territory.

“There’s a lot of talk about what potential the North has, especially the Northwest Territories, but the Northwest Territories is not in a good place economically and government projects isn’t the end-all and be-all. We need to get resource development projects for the Northwest Territories so the territory is prosperous again,” he said.

The NWT’s Mackenzie Valley Highway and Arctic Economic and Security Corridor have been referred to the Major Projects Office and are on the path to becoming projects of national interest.

Sahtu leaders and businesses have said a highway connecting Wrigley to Inuvik would have a massive impact and bring economic potential to the region, while NWT minister Caroline Wawzonek said the Arctic Economic and Security Corridor would grant access to parts of Canada that could produce mines and driving Canada’s economy.

Zimmer said the Mackenzie Valley Highway was “one of those things you actually want them to deliver on.”

“Carney took probably half our platform, because I’ve heard people say you need to be more hopeful and offer some solutions and I said, ‘Well, we did, but he just took them all,'” Zimmer said.

“We’ll be watching and voters can only be so patient for so long. I think that’s going to be the difference maker.”

This interview was recorded on August 21, 2026. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Ollie Williams: What do you hope your colleagues got out of the trip?

Bob Zimmer: It was really to meet the people of the North. We often just look at the North as a place and a region, but when you see northerners, real Arctic northerners – you start to see their smiles, you get to know them as people a little bit – you tend to care about people that you meet rather than just sort of a region. So we met quite a few locals and heard about affordability issues, housing issues, and just general issues in the North. Like you just can’t get certain things to the North quickly, you can’t get to the North quickly. So even just getting there was an experience to show, like look we’re in a place that’s pretty far away from Ottawa. So I think they got that fulsome experience.

And some of the the more fun stuff was taking a dip in the Arctic Ocean, [we] had some beluga, had some caribou, and again just met some really cool people along the way while doing that.

Let’s talk about some of the politics behind this. Arctic sovereignty, northern resource development, they were your file before they became, to some extent, the Carney government’s brand. There’s highways moving under construction now, $35 billion is the defence spending being talked about. What have you been learning during this trip about what a Conservative government would or could do in the NWT that this Liberal government isn’t already doing or promising to do?

One thing that we’ve seen with Liberals is they often talk about things. We’ve had 10 years of that under Justin Trudeau, a lot of talk and not a whole lot of outcomes. A lot of money spent, but the outcomes aren’t readily seen. And so even though Mark Carney’s made big announcements with some of these northern projects, which we applaud obviously. Even his Mackenzie Valley project that he’s recently spoken about, great, glad you’re paying attention to this. The Alaska Highway was built from Dawson Creek to Fairbanks, Alaska in nine months and here we are with a Major Projects Office that doesn’t even have a major project on its list yet in 16 months. It’s probably 17 months now. So my hope is that he follows through with his promises.

In terms of what the Conservatives would do different than what Liberals are doing, well, we deliver. We made a promise about the Port of Iqaluit, we delivered. We made a promise about the Inuvik to Tuk Highway, we delivered. It’s one thing to make a promise, but it’s another thing to deliver.

The NWT’s Premier, RJ Simpson, has talked about the Mackenzie Valley Highway being built from Wrigley all the way up to Inuvik in a five-year window. If the federal government lives up to that, that’s much, much quicker than was previously talked about. Would you be prepared to say “OK, that is delivering”?

Absolutely. The whole point of being up there – I did a video on it too. It’s one of those things you actually want them to deliver on, a promise they’ve made that we hope they keep.

The runway in Inuvik, that extension is still undone. It costs $300 million and it’s another 3,000 feet and it’s still not complete and that affects our Arctic sovereignty and security.

When I first was given the job by Erin O’Toole, he told me “Bob, we want to bring some awareness around Arctic sovereignty and security.” So that’s what I’ve been doing. And I will take some credit that we have some attention. We brought some of those concerns like the Green Hangar (an aircraft hangar in Inuvik) to Ottawa and some of them have been resolved. I’d say some aren’t, but at least the attention of Canadians is on the Arctic, especially when we have attention by other – not necessarily allies – from Russia and China. Their attention is well focused on the Arctic.

We need to make sure that we’re doing our best to really claim our Arctic sovereignty because there’s other nations that are in the area now and they’re seeing the potential of resource development. We need to remind them it belongs to Canada.

The NWT’s in the process of losing a big economic pillar in the diamond mines. We’ve seen one close already, a second one is now closing because it’s in serious financial difficulties, the third one is not much healthier. Is the federal government going about replacing that industrial tax base the right way by looking to invest heavily in construction and invest heavily in defence, or is there a different way that you’d pursue?

I think the defence and the measures they’re pursuing, like Grays Bay is another one we think is a good pursuit. It’s something that we supported too. But again, it’s supposed to be a multi-use road for defence “and…” but what’s the and? I think that’s the mystery that Carney maybe hasn’t explained so well. Are they going to be supportive of getting resources developed in the North, resources like oil and gas, resources like critical minerals? We saw Justin Trudeau try and within six months after his ribbon cutting, that particular company was bankrupt.

There’s a lot of talk about what potential the North has, especially the Northwest Territories, but the Northwest Territories is not in a good place economically and government projects isn’t the end-all and be-all. We need to get resource development projects for the Northwest Territories so the territory is prosperous again.

The Conservative leader is doing a big push right now for gas tax relief. It can only go so far in the Northwest Territories in terms of how it would address the cost of living. There are all sorts of levers that government can pull up here from Nutrition North to tax deductions to everything else. If Conservatives were in charge here, what levers would you be pulling right now beyond relief at the pumps to try and help people out in the North?

I was thinking about that exact thing, because we’re just doing some food price videos and how expensive things are. It’s really a multifaceted answer to your question. That’s of course important, especially with such a diesel reliant region, that we have tax relief [and] get rid of taxes on diesel especially.

Nutrition North too is something we’ve been studying at INAN committee [the Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs] and it was set out to be something that would help northerners afford food better and we’re saying that, in many respects, it’s not working as planned. So the audit of that I think is forthcoming. We’re going to be looking more into it as a committee and even the federal government’s acknowledging they’re looking into it too, what else can work better. I applaud whatever we can do to make that program work better.

If you are a community where there’s work and there’s high employment, low unemployment, then even higher priced goods are somewhat affordable to locals. But if you have the same small community that has a high unemployment rate, I think Tuktoyaktuk is 75-percent unemployment, then it becomes almost impossible to afford a $15 gallon of milk or it’s $13 for one pound of ground beef.

But if the economy’s better, even if the prices of food are a little higher, then it becomes a lot more possible for people to afford to put food on their tables and roofs over their heads. Prosperity means bringing up ways that resources can be developed in the North because we know there’s a lot of resources, especially in the Northwest Territories. Develop resources, reduce the taxes that can be reduced, and I think we’ll have a lot more prosperous of a territory as a result.

Note: The unemployment rate for Tuktoyaktuk as of 2024, the latest community-based figure available from the NWT Bureau of Statistics, was 20.2 percent.

Of course it doesn’t help that both the territorial and federal governments are having to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the effects of climate up here. What have you and your colleagues been talking about in terms of the climate crisis as it’s unfolding in the NWT and what needs to happen on that file?

I think just one aspect of it is the wildfire management or forest management or lack of. Some of it’s federal, some of it’s territorial and provincial, I understand that, but I think the more that we can address the obvious– I was just seeing Mikey McBryan at Buffalo Airways, they’re still very busy fighting fires in Quebec and all across Canada. But I think we need to do a better job of harvesting our forests in a way that doesn’t make them susceptible to wildfires, and we have that technology.

I watched a presentation – this was two years ago – where we have satellite coverage of the Earth to see where fuel loads are, and possibly have the ability to encourage forest companies to log those particular at-risk areas before they burn. That’s one little aspect of one way we can combat some of those challenges in the North.

I would say the best way we can tackle some of these issues is with a good economy and right now the Northwest Territories is struggling that way. You mentioned already the last diamond mine is going to close probably by the end of this year, and there’s really nothing on the horizon, no exploration. I think we need to look into what can be done federally and territorially to increase exploration of the territories and hopefully we can get to a good place where that starts happening again and bring the Northwest Territories back into prosperity again.

I wanted to ask about some of the political math here. When you look at the national federal picture, the polls aren’t that great for the Conservatives. What is it about the party’s messaging that you wish would land more clearly with voters, particularly in the North?

I think some of that messaging landed very well. I mean Carney took probably half our platform, because I’ve heard people say you need to be more hopeful and offer some solutions and I said, “Well, we did, but he just took them all.”

But that leaves you in a bind, right? Because how are you going to differentiate yourselves now?

This is where we differentiate, when I talked about the Port of Iqaluit and the Tuk to Inuvik Highway, is we got things done.

People are giving Prime Minister Mark Carney some time to follow through with his promises, but give them some time and then they’re going to start to grow very impatient because again, 10 years of Liberals before that, Carney’s a continuation of Trudeau. He’s even spending twice as much in the next five years as Trudeau had planned to. Trudeau had planned to spend $154 billion, Carney’s at $328, $329 billion. So I think the voter is going to grow impatient as these promises aren’t delivered.

I guess that’s the question for the people that voted for Mark Carney. Is this guy going to actually follow through with all those promises? Because I’ve heard from many northerners that say, “Look, it’s easy to make a promise in Ottawa about what are you going to do in the North. It’s a lot more difficult to pull it off.”

So we’ll be watching and voters can only be so patient for so long. I think that’s going to be the difference maker. The difference that we’re going to do is when we promise something, we’re going to get it done.