What will you do when the river becomes shallow and the roads are gone?

This is part of a new series I plan to start doing regularly. Many of you have asked for more opinion pieces.

The vast majority of you have said you're also fine with them being shorter if it means you get to hear me talk, so consider this my first attempt at something smaller.

Hopefully, this will satiate some demand!

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Two years.

That’s how long the Sahtu region of the Northwest Territories went without the Mackenzie Resupply. Low water levels, primarily at the difficult-to-navigate Rampart and Providence Rapids, had kept the traditional barges—once the lifeline of resupply across the North—from reaching the region.

This year came close. The Coast Guard remained uncertain well into June if the river’s water levels would be sufficient to allow the barges to travel up the 1,740 km-long Mackenzie River.

Thankfully, this year was kinder than the last. The Canadian Coast Guard confirmed that the water levels were sufficient for barges to travel up to Sahtu, albeit with a much reduced season.

Yet not all is good. The short notice of the season meant that this year was full of chaos. People were given less than three weeks to ensure they had everything ready for tow. That came only after a second barge was made available.

Originally, residents were given only four days to bring their cargo to Hay River, the hub that has, since 1964, been the starting point for the Mackenzie Resupply. With lead times stretching up to two weeks to get supplies, this meant that many were unable to even get anything, let alone get it to Hay River for shipment.

Hay River is the terminus of the Mackenzie Northern Railway (or the Meander Subdivision). Starting at Grimshaw, Alberta, and running up through the Northwest Territories, it is Canada’s northernmost rail line, stretching nearly 600 km.

The line was originally proposed in the early sixties as one of many northern development projects proposed by the government of John Diefenbaker and approved in 1961.

This was part of his larger Roads to Resources program, an infrastructure development initiative looking to build out the transportation network of the Territories to better facilitate resource development.

While many projects proposed under Roads to Resources never happened, some, such as the Dempster Highway, managed to get through the gate—albeit with much difficulty and after many years of construction.

Backed by nearly $100 million in funding, the rail line would take three years to complete, with as much difficulty as one expected of Arctic projects. Its completion was hailed as a turning point—a show of Canadian sovereignty.

Since then, it has remained a vital lifeline, bringing supplies from the south up to Hay River, and then to the many isolated communities along the Mackenzie’s shores and beyond.

Yet that lifeline is also in danger. After a devastating fire damaged the line in 2023, CN Rail, which operates the line as the Meander Subdivision, announced that it would be discontinuing the track between Enterprise and Hay River.

They said the cost was too expensive for the amount of freight it handled, and they would begin the process of deactivating the line. Once envisioned as part of the hands outstretched from south to north, joining the country together, the story of the Mackenzie Northern Railway might end not with spectacle, but with a sad whimper.

Cargo would now need to be trucked from Enterprise to Hay River, a process that will take longer, be more expensive, and require dozens of trucks to replace the loss of the line.

Certainly for the people of the Sahtu region this is just another toss into the mud. Complaints about the cost of shipping, which in some cases have nearly tripled, have already put strain on those who rely on these services to bring supplies for the year.

Marine Transportation Services, the government-run barge service that funnels fuel and supplies up the river, has said that these prices are needed to ensure they are not operating at a loss—something that the Government of the Northwest Territories, already running a heavy infrastructure deficit, cannot merely afford to ignore.

Infrastructure across the North is failing. We are trying to keep up with it. Projects like extending the Mackenzie Highway, the Arctic Security Corridor stretching from Yellowknife to Nunavut’s planned Grays Bay deepwater port, and the completion of the Inuvik-Tuktoyaktuk Highway in 2017 certainly help.

These are major, nation-building projects that should be supported and celebrated. They will play a massive role in the North’s transportation network, especially as existing infrastructure continues to fall into disuse and failure.

That includes the fragile permafrost, whose melting poses a massive risk to existing infrastructure and the ice road network—the interconnected system of winter roads that has often been the only road access many northern communities have during the year.

The shifting climate is already taking a toll on these fragile systems. For many communities, even here in Northern Ontario where I live, the warmer winters often mean the season these roads are open is shrinking, sometimes from months to mere weeks.

Many of these road systems are in danger of failure entirely. The people of Cat Lake First Nation, for example, have seen their ice road season nearly cut in half. That isn’t in the future. It isn’t ten years down the road. It’s happening now to the nearly 60,000 Canadians who depend on the 6,000 km of ice roads to keep them supplied.

For some, they can replace this with airlift. It is an expensive alternative and, for some, unsustainable—yet it is a solution. For others, this is it. This is all they have. There are no alternatives coming, and while they might have more time than their southern counterparts, and while their risk of failure is less, there is no way to truly stop what is coming.

Back to the Mackenzie, while this season was lucky to go ahead, the same can’t be said for the future. The truth is that it will only get worse from here. The Northwest Territories, as with much of Canada, is still undergoing a major drought period.

For the Northwest Territories, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (which continues to monitor current drought conditions) said this just last month:

“In the Northwest Territories, Abnormally Dry (D0) to Severe Drought (D2) conditions expanded across southern and central areas due to high temperatures, growing precipitation deficits, and ongoing low surface water levels. Additionally, in southern areas, drought impacts necessitate the maintenance of Extreme Drought (D3) areas. Long-term drought conditions in the Northwest Territories have contributed to low river and lake levels in southern regions.”

These kinds of complex systems don’t exist in isolation. The low snowpack in places such as the Peace River Basin, Liard River Basin, and Athabasca-Slave System directly affects the water levels of the Mackenzie.

The Peace River, dealing with record low snowpack and now the Site C Dam, directly affects the water levels in Great Slave Lake, the source of nearly a quarter of the Mackenzie River’s water supply. In fact, 50 percent of Great Slave Lake’s water supply is tied to the Peace River.

And let’s not pretend like these issues won’t get worse. It would be foolish to believe they wouldn’t—and the fact is, they will get worse a lot faster than many people believe. Certainly, among decision-makers, there seems to be a sense of inconvenient concern.

I am not an Arctic expert either. I am a person who takes note of these things because they’re important to what I write. I am missing some context. I am missing some issues. I am missing some data. That is important to acknowledge.

But if you think this is bleak, then remember that there is worse that even I don’t know about. That is the scariest thing of all to me. The situation is likely much worse than I could write out at this time.

But for many people, they would never know. Sure, there are articles out there, you can find information. Yet to the average Canadian, even to many interested in this stuff, these issues are a distant and oft-undiscussed concern.

So much security discussion that reaches the public is based around the military side of things that we can quickly forget the importance of human and environmental security. Don’t get me wrong—among academia and those with knowledge of these issues, they’re a hot topic.

Do you know how CAF gets fuel and supplies around the North? There are no special transportation networks. There is no special solution they can pull out of a hat. The same networks that the local population uses are also the same ones that are critical to our national defence. These failures will also be critical failures for supporting operations up North.

Instead, these supplies have to go all the way around to places like Tuktoyaktuk because that’s what’s available. That means either crossing through the Beaufort Sea or the Northwest Passage.

It means that supply from down south is either limited to where the highways go—which is already very inefficient and limiting—or has to be flown in, if it’s possible. This isn’t a future issue. It’s an ongoing issue that is already causing serious problems.

You all know I try to be positive. I don’t like to do rants and raves. However, I struggle to find the positive here. There is none. We’re walking into a catastrophic failure, and there’s barely a whisper to be heard about it.

It pains me. It makes me furious to imagine that tens of thousands are hurt, that one of our key pieces of northern infrastructure is at risk because of one company’s choice, because of a refusal to pay $15 million.

Perhaps giving companies the mandate of heaven over critical infrastructure—to do and toss away as they wish—was never a good idea. It can’t all be on them either. We could have the tools to prevent things like this from happening. We could have a rail banking system to ensure that we have a proper chance to save these critical rail lines before they’re torn up.

It infuriates me to no degree to see this pantomime play out. Among a myriad of other challenges, while we hear preaching of dual-use infrastructure and Arctic security, this isn’t an issue at the forefront of the discussion.

The dual-use infrastructure you already have is failing. Where are you? What are you doing? You can’t stop it—that ship has sailed. It’s a mitigation game, a race to keep up with what the worsening effects of climate change will bring.

You can’t fight nature. You won’t be able to fight the changing climate. We won’t reverse this trend. We’re at a point where we’re just trying to soften the blow. Yet that’s not an excuse to do nothing—far from it. It makes these issues even more urgent to tackle, to get moving on before we reach the point of catastrophic failure.

And I’m not here to promote solutions, because truthfully I don’t know what they are. The best I can do is raise these issues and their severity. That’s hard, though, when our fundamental discussions of the Arctic are so far from where they need to be.

While we continue to scream about sovereignty issues that aren’t there and threats that will never materialize, when we look at the Arctic as a strictly military affair we drown out the actual core of the problems.

I get dozens of questions a week, speak to dozens of people. The Arctic is a common topic. Do you know how much I’ve heard about our environmental security in the last three months? About the potential for humanitarian crisis?

Twice.

It’s an issue most don’t care for because they just don’t know. They don’t hear this stuff. We don’t hear the federal government taking action. We don’t hear the media speaking of it. We hear lots about Chinese icebreakers and how worrying they are.

We will gladly hear about climate issues if they involve the Northwest Passage—where people have decided the issue deserves attention. The discussion of Arctic security is limited to whatever topics are deemed of interest.

Let’s hear about the Port of Churchill because maybe we can ship some things to Europe. Notice a pattern for a lot of these concerns? What takes priority? It frustrates me. It hurts to think of what little is being done, of all the people who hear how important the Arctic is, yet never how important they are.

And I apologize if I sound emotional and upset here. I try to keep my composure, and I know many of you come here for thoughtful, detailed analysis of things. You don’t come here for ranting and me screaming.

However, if someone doesn’t raise these issues, then who will? How many of you knew about the severity of the situation? How much have you ever thought of it? Solutions come from discussions, and the longer we don’t have these conversations—if we don’t make these an issue—then there will be no reason to treat them as serious.

Security is complex. The Arctic is complex. Yet the hands are slipping, and the region risks becoming even more separate from the rest of Canada. It is a move backward at a time when we can’t afford that.

So long as you treat the Arctic as a faraway, distant land—so long as you make it feel foreign—no one outside the Arctic will care what happens. Canadians will continue to see it as an issue far from their minds.

It’s why I keep saying that Arctic security comes through integration. Integration through finance, commerce, energy, infrastructure, people. When you make the Arctic, to the average Canadian, feel like part of Canada—when you interweave it into the common mosaic—then they will start to care about these issues.

When the Mackenzie runs shallow, and the barges struggle year after year to go up and down the river—what then?

Will you truck fuel over tundra that no longer freezes, when the ice roads vanish before your eyes and never return?

Will you fly food by the ton to villages where the runways heave amd buckle from thawing permafrost? Will you rebuild the country’s lifelines one helicopter at a time?

You can’t ship diesel through the air, can’t haul food on roads that no longer exist. The North depends on these arteries of water and ice that once carried everything—fuel, food, people—and when they’re gone, no amount of speeches will keep the lights on.

There's a countdown. Mother Earth don’t care for headlines, and the climate doesn’t negotiate. We have once good chance to tackle these issues? After it passes? I dont even want to think about it.