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Report pitches Mackenzie Valley Highway to Canadian Arctic
The Northwest Territories government has revived a long-held dream — it wants a highway to Canada’s third ocean.
In a government report released Nov. 29, Premier Joe Handley and Transportation Minister Michael McLeod made a pitch for federal government funding to complete the “missing link” in Canada’s highway network by filling the 500-mile gap from the Arctic Ocean to the Northwest Territories’ existing road system.
“The political and economic difficulties that impeded the completion of the Mackenzie Valley Highway over three decades ago have improved,” they said.
“It’s a project whose time has come,” McLeod said.
Completing to the tiny Arctic port of Tuktoyaktuk would cost about C$700 million and replace winter roads that see trucks operate on ice-covered rivers and frozen ground, which the report says is endangered by global warming. Limited transportation inefficient “The existing limited transportation window makes development and exploration activities expensive and inefficient,” the report said.
Handley has also talked about turning Tuktoyaktuk into a deepwater port in anticipation that a reduced freeze-up will open the way for more ships to use the Northwest Passage.
In addition, the NWT government wants C$162 million to upgrade its existing highway infrastructure in answer to the growing demands of resource development and Canada’s fast-growing economy.
McLeod said a road to the Arctic Ocean would support resource development along the Mackenzie Valley and the Beaufort Delta, where oil and gas exploration is staging a comeback, partly in response to the proposed C$7 billion Mackenzie Gas Project, as well as northern sovereignty, emergency response and economic and social development. Road started in 1972 Since first being floated in the 1950s, a road to the Arctic was started in 1972 and stopped five years later when a 10-year moratorium was imposed on oil and gas development in Canada’s Far North.
In recent years, diamond mines have opened in the NWT and prospects of a gas and liquids pipeline from the Mackenzie Delta have staged a comeback.
The Delta-Beaufort region alone has an estimated 9 trillion cubic feet of discovered gas and 52 tcf undiscovered, while the oil potential is rated in the billions of barrels.
—Gary Park
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