The Kitikmeot’s road to riches?

AARON SPITZER

IQALUIT — After loads of hype and lots of waiting, preliminary work on the Bathurst Inlet road-and-port project is under way.

Late last month, engineers and environmentalists began studying a site at the southern end of Bathurst Inlet, where a consortium of government departments, Inuit organizations and mining companies hopes to build a deep-water port.

The researchers will also scout the route of a proposed all-weather road linking the port to Contwoyto Lake on the Nunavut-NWT border.

The road and port would provide a transportation corridor between the Arctic coast and the Kitikmeot region’s mineral-rich interior.

The project’s backers say it will spark the development of promising mining properties in the region, including the Izok Lake lead, zinc and nickel deposit 265 kilometres southeast of Kugluktuk.

Keith Peterson, a member of the technical committee overseeing the road-and-port study, said that if all goes well, trucks could ply the 200-kilometre road in five or six years, moving construction materials from the port to budding mine sites.

A few years after that, mining rigs could be hauling hundreds of tonnes of ore to ships docked at the port.

The project could slash the cost of getting supplies and fuel to the hard-to-reach region. Currently, material for area mines like Lupin and Diavik is hauled overland 2,300 kilometres from Edmonton, by rail and across winter ice-roads.

Shipping goods through the Arctic Ocean to Bathurst Inlet would be far cheaper, and the all-weather road would lengthen the trucking season, which is currently limited by ice conditions to several weeks in late winter.

Access across Contwoyto Lake would be by ice road in the winter and barge in the summer.

Though the road would be Nunavut’s first “highway,” it wouldn’t link any communities and it wouldn’t be open to the public. According to Peterson, its operators plan to charge a toll to the companies that use it.

Peterson said the road and port are expected to cost $250 million to build.
According to Anthony Saez of the Nunavut government’s Department of Transportation, the preliminary studies on the project will cost about $6 million — $3 million from the federal Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, and just over $1.5 million each from the GN and mining companies such Inmet Mining Corp. of Toronto, which owns the Izok Lake property.

Other routes for the road have been considered, including one that would take it to Coronation Gulf, close to Kugluktuk. But that path, Peterson said, would be longer and cost twice as much as the road now under consideration.

“Somebody has to pay for it,” Peterson said. “The whole idea of this thing, if I understand it right, is to try not to be a drain on the federal and territorial government. Make it pay for itself.”

“The whole idea of this thing, if I understand it right, is to try not to be a drain on the federal and territorial government. Make it pay for itself.”
— Keith Peterson

Peterson said the project could have spin-off benefits, such as driving down consumer costs in Kitikmeot communities by providing a deep-water port where fuel and other bulk goods could be bought and stored for distribution.

Peterson said community consultations on the project will be conducted while preliminary environmental and engineering work continues.

He said opponents of the project will get a fair hearing, despite the intense political support for the road and port coming from Kitikmeot political leaders — including Peterson himself, who is the mayor of Cambridge Bay.

“Basically were going to do everything on this project that would be expected of anybody else,” he said. “There’s going to be no corners cut, no favours accepted.”