Donald Trump has forced a new urgency on the campaign trail and up and down the country to unleash the North’s potential or risk Arctic sovereignty and a northern treasure trove of resources
Brendan Bell knows what it is like to be ignored. It wasn’t so many months ago that the chief executive of West Kitikmeot Resources Corp., an Inuit-owned company proposing to build a road and deepwater ocean port in the Arctic, was spending a chunk of each day waiting for non-Arctic people to return his phone calls to discuss the project.
“This road is not a new idea,” he said. “Roads have a long history in the North.” Do they ever. Yet that history can be summarized as roads — and major infrastructure projects of all types — may get proposed for the Arctic, but they generally don’t get built. No surprise then that Bell had been contending with an utterly non-urgent vibe from other people in relation to the Grays Bay Road and Port Project. That is until recently, when a lot of those same people started calling him back.
Given all roads lead to Donald Trump lately, it is no mystery why. In launching a trade war against Canada, the United States is no longer a friendly ally, at least at the top, and that is a driving reason behind why the narrative around roads that do not get built in the Arctic has shifted to one that Canada better start building roads, deepwater ports, naval installations, mines, power grids and fibre-optic networks as soon as possible or risk ceding its Arctic sovereignty and a northern treasure house of critical minerals to a foreign power.
For the rest of this article: https://financialpost.com/feature/want-canada-to-win-unlock-the-arctic-now