By Michael Ganley -- Commercial or subsistence fishing, tourism, sovereignty, mining, personal safety: whichever way you slice it, Nunavut’s lack of marine infrastructure is hampering the territory’s development at every turn.
The front-end loader creeps down the muddy bank to the water’s edge, crosses a ramp to a waiting barge, and slides its forks under a large blue sea can. Lifting with a roar and a puff of smoke, the loader heads back over the ramp and up the bank to the staging area. It sets the sea can down beside four others, then back down the bank and onto the barge for the next one. When the last sea can is taken to shore, the tug drags the barge out through the ice pans to be reloaded from the freighter, moored safely in the distance. Back and forth, back and forth, as long as high tide allows.
It’s the annual rite of the sealift in Pangnirtung, Nunavut, a rite that will be repeated hundreds of times this summer at communities across Nunavut. During the short ice-free season, a flotilla of ships and barges makes its way up the Labrador coast from Montreal and down the Mackenzie River from Hay River, delivering vehicles and construction materials and food to Nunavut’s 26 isolated communities. When they arrive, the ships moor in the deep waters offshore, and the long, slow process of putting sea cans onto barges and then floating them to the shore begins.
With the deliveries, the shelves at the stores will fill up, families will get their year’s supply of toilet paper and canned goods and whatever else they ordered from the expediter, and kids will have all the pop they can drink.
It’s a welcome site for Nunavummiut, but far from an efficient process. While the volume of material being shipped into Nunavut is strong and growing with government investment in housing and the explosion in mining activity, basic infrastructure to support the sealift is lacking. With an ocean coastline of 104,000 kilometres (about 43 per cent of Canada’s ocean coastline), Nunavut does not have a single harbour. Some of the communities don’t even have a dock or a breakwater. The only option for a fisherman in Kugaaruk and Repulse Bay is to drive his or her boat right up onto the beach. So while more than 1,200 government-owned harbours contribute to the economies of communities large and small from Newfoundland and Labrador to B.C., Nunavut is left seriously wanting.
“One of the problems with the Arctic is that there is essentially no infrastructure,” says Christopher Wright, the president of Mariport Group Ltd. He recently completed a study for Transport Canada on Arctic shipping. “There are no proper wharf and dock facilities for any of the communities.”
“A lot of the problems we have are related to tides,” says Suzanne Paquin, a vice-president with Nunavut Eastern Arctic Shipping Inc., one of several companies that deliver the annual sealift into Nunavut. “We lose a lot of time because we’re waiting, especially at a large community like Iqaluit. What you want to be able to do is discharge the barges 24 hours per day, and not have to wait for the tide.”
The poor condition of marine infrastructure in Nunavut hampers the territory’s development in a number of ways. It makes it difficult to develop a fishery, even though the territory has some very rich fishing grounds, particularly east of Baffin Island. It makes it difficult for tourists, who are arriving in increasing numbers on cruise ships, to get ashore and leave some of their dollars in the communities. It endangers the lives of boaters who launch along rugged shorelines. It hampers search and rescue operations, and it increases the time, and therefore the cost, of the sealift. Investment in small-scale marine infrastructure would bring economic benefits to Nunavut in a variety of ways and would also, by creating healthier, more economically sustainable communities, contribute to Canada’s Northern sovereignty claims.
The solution from NEAS’s perspective is not a deepwater port or two, despite the fixation of politicians at various levels of government on such mega-projects. Municipal and territorial leaders in Iqaluit have long made the case for a deepwater port in the capital city, but Paquin says such a major investment is not necessary. “There’s a breakwater there already, the causeway,” she says. “I would turn that into a ramp and staging area. You don’t have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, it could be a relatively small investment.”
In fact, a deepwater port, which would likely have just one berth, may create as many problems for sealift operators as it solves. “If you look at Iqaluit, you can get five or six ships there at a time,” Paquin says. “If you have a deep sea facility with one berth, who has priority?” There would be just as much sitting and waiting offshore as there is now.
No, the solution would look very much like a series of recommendations found in a federal report of three years ago. The now-dusty Nunavut Small Craft Harbours report, produced by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the government of Nunavut, concluded that a series of small harbours built across the territory would be a wise investment. Delivered to the federal cabinet two years ago, the report says that fishing-harbour infrastructure in Pangnirtung, Clyde River, Qikiqtarjuaq, Pond Inlet, Chesterfield Inlet, Repulse Bay and Kugaaruk would generate $14.4-million in gross domestic product and 173 jobs during construction, and more importantly would create $7.9-million in GDP and 198 jobs on an ongoing basis, reducing unemployment in the seven communities by 26 per cent. The cost to build the seven harbours was pegged at $41.2-million.
So far, no concrete results have flowed from the report, although Pangnirtung, which has an operating and modestly successful fish processing plant, will soon see improvements to its modest harbour. Ottawa is currently in the process of designing the facility, which will come with a price tag of around $8-million. It will include a second breakwater for the community and a dock capable of handling a fishing trawler of up to 65 metres. It will be the first investment in new marine infrastructure in Nunavut since a barge terminal and breakwater were built in Kugluktuk three years ago for about $2-million.
Instead of endorsing such modest but extremely useful investments, a year ago Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced that an existing port at Nanisivik, on the northern end of Baffin Island, would be expanded and upgraded at a cost of $100-million for both military and civilian use. The site of a former lead and zinc mine, Nanisivik will be reborn in the context of sovereignty. “The first principle of Arctic sovereignty is use it or lose it,” said Harper when he made the announcement from Resolute Bay. “Today’s announcements tell the world that Canada has a real, growing, long-term presence in the Arctic.”
The federal government’s other major investment in Northern marine infrastructure (together with the province of Manitoba) is $48-million in improvements to the port of Churchill, Manitoba and the rail line leading to it. The private-sector operator of the port and rail line, the Hudson Bay Rail Company, has also committed to spending $20-million over 10 years to maintain the rail line. These investments will surely benefit the sealift heading into the Kivalliq region of Nunavut with more reliable service (the line has been plagued by derailments in recent years) and lower prices.
But those two large investments, totalling $168-million, are not giving the bang for the buck that the baby steps of breakwaters, small harbours, gravel landing pads, lighting and the rest would give for each community.
For what it’s worth, the cause of marine infrastructure in Nunavut has the support of the Senate’s standing committee on fisheries and oceans, following the committee’s tour of the territory in June. “Your coastal communities in a sense provide the infrastructure of our Northern sovereignty,” said committee chair William Rompkey in a recent letter to Nunatsiaq News. Himself a Newfoundlander and well aware of the usefulness of a fishing wharf, Rompkey continued: “So can’t this rich country in turn provide proper port infrastructure for more of your coastal communities? I expect my committee colleagues will make this a strong recommendation.”
Patterk Netser, Nunavut’s minister of economic development and transportation, made a similar plea to the federal government. “We don’t accept that it is the intention of the federal government to build only one harbour here in Nunavut, where there are 25 communities,” he said. “Small craft harbours are essential to the economic growth of the territory, and we will continue to press the federal government to provide the infrastructure we need to build a sustainable economy.”
If Nunavut is looking for a possible model for refurbishing its marine infrastructure at a measured pace and for less money, it need look no farther than the Nunavik region of northern Quebec, where a remarkable transformation has occurred over the last decade. Beginning in 1998, the region’s Inuit-owned development corporation, the Makivik Corporation, has made significant upgrades to the facilities at each of Nunavik’s 14 communities. “The primary concern for the majority of the communities, certainly on the Ungava coast where you have very high tides, is access to water,” says Eileen Klinkig, special project manager with Makivik. “It’s been quite a task to figure out the needs for each community, each one has very different problems, but access to water was primary for most of them.”
Funded equally by the governments of Quebec and Canada to the tune of $88-million, Makivik has built breakwaters, ramps and causeways. It has expanded staging areas. It has installed anchoring bolts, winches and lighting (solar-powered, in one case in whichthere was no easy access to hydro poles). “It’s not a lot of money, considering it’s for 14 communities and the conditions we have up North,” Klinkig says. “The key was really the breakwaters and the ramps so they have a sheltered area where they can access the water.”
So now in every community, running from town across the mud flats to the water’s edge – even at low tide, which can be extremely low in Ungava Bay – is a simple gravel road. It allows for the offloading of vessels 24 hours per day, alleviating the long downtimes that drive up the sealift costs. And the benefits of these relatively modest investments flow not only to the sealift operators. They also help out the local fishermen, search and rescue vessels and emergency services. The entire project will be done by 2010.
The 2005 small-craft harbours report by the DFO and the government of Nunavut concluded that commercial fishing, particularly the shrimp and turbot in the eastern Arctic, “has the most immediate and greatest potential to create non-government employment, promote entrepreneurship, develop management capacity, and perhaps most importantly instill pride, confidence and hope in the 29,000 plus inhabitants of the territory.” Even with a couple of mines opening in the territory, that remains as true today as it was then. And if Canada really wants to assert sovereignty in the North, it should ensure that people living there now and in the future have the means to “use it” in a proud and sustainable way.
