GN to issue design contract for Iqaluit port

This picture, taken in 2003, shoes the slow, unsafe methods that are still used to offload sealift cargo in Iqaluit. (FILE PHOTO)

The Government of Nunavut will award a contract this summer to design a port for Iqaluit, Nunatsiaq News has learned.

Peter Taptuna, minister of economic development and transportation, said last week his department wants to issue the tender for a “conceptual design” some time this month or next. He could not say how much the contract could be worth.

“If there’s a port built here it will benefit the rest of the communities on Baffin and have a trickle-down effect for all of Nunavut,” Taptuna said in an interview.

He said the department wants to see a proposal for a multi-use port that would serve fishing vessels, hunters, sealift companies, and “possibly even ferries” that could one day haul cargo and passengers from Montreal via a highway to Happy Valley-Goose Bay, Labrador that’s due to be completed soon.

A port would allow sealift cargo to be offloaded in hours, instead of days or weeks, and end the costly and sometimes dangerous use of barges to unload cargo onto Iqaluit’s beach.

Taptuna recently returned from Labrador, where he toured a “second-to-none” marine facility in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, as well as the tiny coastal communities of Rigolet and Hopedale, both of which have small craft harbours.

He noted that Newfoundland and Labrador have around 370 docks, while Nunavut, with 40 per cent of Canada’s coastline, has just one, in Pangnirtung, which is under construction.

He said Nunavut needs the federal government to help build more infrastructure if it wants the territory to ever have a more self-sufficient economy.

“It’s totally frustrating,” Taptuna said. “When you talk to the mariners, the operators that do come up here during shipping season, they really can’t understand why we’re in the 1920s for marine infrastructure.”

Taptuna cautioned that the port is not a done deal, and must be economically sustainable for the project to go ahead. That will mean federal, territorial and municipal governments all putting up money for the project.

“We don’t want to raise the cost of incoming resupply,” he said. “It’s got to be multi-use, functional and sustainable.”

But the proposal is a change of tack for the GN. Under former premier Paul Okalik, the GN didn’t give firm support for a deepwater port in Iqaluit, even after the city commissioned a plan for a $50 million port and small craft harbour in 2005.

Instead, they floated the idea of a deepwater port in Kimmirut connected to the capital with an all-weather road as well as the 2004 small craft harbours report, which called for wharfs to be built in seven Nunavut communities.

Taptuna said the GN still wants to see action on that report, which would mean the construction of fishing wharves in Clyde River, Qikiqtarjuaq, Pond Inlet, Chesterfield Inlet, Repulse Bay and Kugaaruk.