By Michael Ganley -- A road stretching the length of the NWT’s Mackenzie Valley has been discussed for more than 70 years. With the federal government preparing to spend billions on infrastructure projects to stimulate the economy, will a plan to build the road be hatched before the pot runs dry?

The Mackenzie Valley winter road north of Wrigley is “lightly engineered,” meaning little blasting and levelling has been done along the route. Instead, it follows the lay of the land over massive outcroppings, up and down grades of 10 and 11 degrees, and across frozen rivers. “It’s unbelievable driving,” says Matco Transportation System’s Damen Anderson, who has travelled the winter road between Wrigley and Fort Good Hope scores of times. “It’s like off-roading, really.”

Though it’s not quite as dramatic as it’s made out to be on the History Channel’s reality TV series, Ice Road Truckers, driving a big rig hundreds of kilometres from the closest town on a little-travelled road, in minus-40 and colder, is not for the faint of heart. The Matco trucks travel in convoys so that help is close at hand if one of them should go through the ice or need help. But Anderson says despite it all he’ll feel some melancholy if an all-weather road ever pushes up this valley. “I’m already sad because they put some bridges in that took the challenge away,” he says. “We used to just drive down through the creek, which often wasn’t frozen over. Sometimes you’d fall through and the water would be up past the wheels. Sometimes you’d get stuck. You’d have three or four trucks lined up behind with one of them pulling you out.”

ut an all-weather road up the Mackenzie Valley – a subject that has been discussed with various levels of seriousness for almost 70 years – is exactly what will happen. The only question is when. Some of it, like the bridge work, is happening now. And there’s a push at various levels of government and within the private sector to get some of this highway completed while the federal government is forking out infrastructure money to stimulate the economy. At least some of that money will make its way North, to one or more projects that meet the “shovel-ready” hoops. The Mackenzie Valley Highway, at least parts of it, is surely in the running.

There is already an all-weather

Mackenzie Highway, running 700 kilometres from the Alberta-NWT border to Wrigley. For many years, it ended at the village of Fort Simpson, with just a seasonal winter road north to connect Wrigley, Norman Wells, Tulita, Deline, Colville Lake and Fort Good Hope with the outside world. But in the spring of 1972, the federal government announced it would extend the road from Simpson to the Dempster Highway, which ends in Inuvik and was then under construction.

Ottawa’s agencies did extensive surveying and planning of the route in the early 1970s. The plan was to build from Fort Simpson to the Dempster over a four-year period. Although the road was only completed from Fort Simpson to Wrigley, a tremendous amount of the engineering and environmental work was done for the entire length of the highway. Pre-engineering and design was done to the point that the project could have gone to the tendering stage.

Other work has gone on since: 39 of the 46 bridges required for the highway have been built. Many of them are on the existing right of way and most are up to the design standards for a two-lane, all-weather road. Still, the estimated cost of what’s left to be done to complete a 1,000-kilometre gravel highway from Wrigley to the highway’s end at Tuktoyaktuk on the Arctic Ocean is just short of $2-billion.

Ray Anderson, Damen’s father, has been driving whatever highway there has been in the Mackenzie Valley since he first moved to Norman Wells in 1962. He’s one of the owners and the president of Matco, the Edmonton-based transportation company that makes its bread and butter from work in the valley. He’s also a passionate advocate for having the highway completed. “Once you open up the road, goods and people flow both ways,” he says. “People will be able to get in a truck and drive down to Hay River or Grande Prairie [Alberta], buy some goods and come back.”

A highway down the Mackenzie would also lower the cost of supplying everything from bananas to gasoline to the communities. “Everything would be cheaper,” says the senior Anderson, “the fuel, foodstuffs, and construction materials.”

Anderson estimates that freight costs for shipping to the town of Inuvik – located in the NWT’s Beaufort Delta region – would go down by as much as 50 per cent, 20 per cent as a result of it being a shorter distance from Edmonton to Inuvik via the Mackenzie Valley than by going through the Yukon and the Dempster Highway, and another 30 per cent because it would be an uninterrupted land connection, without the uncertainty of spring breakup and fall freezeup.

Once established, a highway would also lower the cost for companies doing exploration work up and down the valley, whether for oil and gas or for minerals. The Mackenzie Aboriginal Corp. (MAC) – a joint venture involving four big players in the construction industry – has done a study on the effects a road would have on the development of oil and gas resources. That report, completed in October 2007, estimated the cost of a road from Wrigley to Tuktoyaktuk at $1.8-billion. It also estimated that the “drilling season” – that period of time in the winter when exploration companies can go about their crucial drilling work – would be extended from 90 to 129 days each year. Barrie Robb, vice-president of business development for MAC, says this extra access time would increase the rate at which natural resources could be developed and the rate at which governments would earn taxes and royalties from such development. That’s music both to developers and governments’ ears and an argument for building it.

“Effectively, because you get the road built, activity happens more quickly: You can drill for a longer period of time and that means wells come on and royalties and taxes get paid that much quicker,” says Robb. “In essence, you sum up the value to government in today’s dollars of getting the money earlier instead of later.” The MAC report estimated the government’s increased take at $1-billion (in today’s dollars) over 25 years.

There would also be an increase in tourism opportunities for the communities in the valley, as rubber-tire visitors could finally get there by road. You can expect that the hardiest would do the entire cracked-windshield loop up the Mackenzie and back down the Dempster and through the Yukon.

There are some people in the communities who worry the road will allow easier access to alcohol and drugs and other societal ills, but Peggy Pouw in Norman Wells isn’t one of them. “There’s some people that want the road and there’s some people that don’t,” she says. “But it’s progress and you have to keep up with the rest of Canada. You can’t stay isolated forever.”

In the past, when community consultations have been done about a potential highway, community leaders have expressed confidence that they can plan for and deal with any social disruption. At the same time, many people have expressed environmental concerns, particularly about the impact of a highway on fish and wildlife.

Pouw runs the museum in Norman Wells, which serves as the de facto visitor’s centre. Things have been very slow since oil and gas exploration in the region came to a standstill in 2008 and last winter. “It is really, really dead here without the oil stuff,” she says. “It makes a big difference to this town. You have to consider what’s going to bring money into the NWT. If it isn’t oil and gas, then what is it?”

Western Arctic MP Dennis Bevington, with the New Democratic Party, is a big supporter of a highway as a means of reducing social ills. “I lived in Fort Smith before a highway and after, so I have a good idea of what highways do to a community,” he says. “I see it as something that in many ways liberates a community. It increases entrepreneurship, it gives young people a chance for mobility, there’s a whole number of things that I see as very positive about highways.”

Bevington says he’s doing his part to move the project along with a private member’s bill that he hopes to bring before Parliament. In 1989, the Northwest Territories Department of Transportation took over responsibility for maintenance and operation of existing highways in the territory, but the federal government retained jurisdiction for new road construction. Bevington says that jurisdiction should be given over to the territory because the federal government is dragging its feet.

“Whoever has jurisdiction should be doing planning,” says Bevington. “Can you find that in the federal system? No. It’s not there at all. They haven’t done any of that. Really, they’re not doing their job as far as planning for the future of the North is concerned.” Bevington would like to see studies on the impacts a highway would have on the development of a pipeline and other facilities that might be in a highway corridor, for instance, or on other economic development opportunities. “If we don’t have a sense of how we’re developing the corridor, how can we decide whether what’s going ahead is proper or not?”

Support for the road has also come from the NWT government, which in February voted unanimously to call on Ottawa to get on with the job. While there are some mixed signals coming out of the territory’s Sahtu region, the Dene leadership has for a while now broadly supported the construction of the highway.

Ray Anderson would like to see a small group of representatives brought together to coordinate the project. “I think we’d be better to look at this project by asking what is affordable and what has the most advantage,” says Anderson. “I’d like to see a tight team, maybe half a dozen people, one representing the aboriginal community, one representing the existing communities, somebody with some on-the-ground trucking experience and some economic development and transport people from government.”

There is some urgency to get on with at least portions of the project. The federal government has promised a large pot of money for “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects to stimulate the moribund economy. Ottawa will want to do one or two big projects in the North, and probably in the NWT. While the entire road may not be sufficiently planned to qualify for stimulus money, certain sections are or could be made so quickly: These include the portion from the Dempster Highway to Fort Good Hope, perhaps, or from Norman Wells south to Wrigley.

Whichever decision is made, moving on the project would stimulate the economy of the Mackenzie Valley now and well into the future. “It takes some decisions now and some willingness to get at it instead of fighting about whose truck is going to go to work or spending a lot of time deciding the colour of the centre line,” says Robb. “Let’s not worry about that level of detail. Let’s get the work first and then figure out how to do it. If we worry about the wrong issues now we’re going to miss the opportunity.”