By NICK STEWART
For outsiders, the Far North winter road program may be little more than a point of interest as an item on which the provincial government spends more than $3 million every year. However, for some of the 23 First Nation communities that find themselves connected for a few short months every year, it’s nothing short of an economic lifeline.
“In those three months that the winter roads are open, a lot of those communities and businesses tend to transport in six or eight months worth of goods, and in some cases they transport in the entire year’s worth,” says Mike Mamakwa, general manager of the Asheweig Winter Road Corporation.
“It really is very crucial for a lot of these places.”
The Asheweig Winter Road Corporation, which oversees the construction of nearly 350 kilometres of winter road every year, caters to six communities: Kasabonika Lake, Kingfisher Lake, Big Trout Lake, Wapekeka, Wawakapewin and Wunnumin Lake First Nations.
For these communities, and many others involved in the winter road program, these temporary roads carved out of the ice and snow represent the only land-based transportation residents see throughout the year, as the nearest highways are blocked by lakes or swampland.
This leaves a relatively small window, typically stretching between early January and late March, where vehicles can travel in and out of the area. For the Asheweig communities alone, this means roughly 80 light traffic vehicles such as half-tons, mini-vans and the like, and 300 commercial vehicles.
This allows the communities to bring in big-ticket commodities in over the winter road rather than via air. The cost differences are significant, Mamakwa says, especially when it comes to key resources such as gas: while flying it in raises the local cost to nearly $2 a litre, bringing it in via the winter road lowers the price to $1.35 a litre.
This isn’t to say that the winter road program isn’t without problems.
Paul Capon, policy advisor for the Matawa First Nations, says the increasingly warmer temperatures threaten to occasionally isolate communities for greater periods of time. As the mercury rises, the safety of the winter roads drop as the ice and snow-packed cover becomes unstable and less suited to handle the pressures of heavy traffic.
More important, however, is the potential for these reduced periods of road access to have a significant and highly negative financial impact on the related communities.
With the province chipping in 50 per cent of the annual costs of building and maintaining a winter road and Indian and Northern Affairs Canada recently beginning to commit up to 40 per cent, some communities are left footing some of the remaining tab.
In fact, a great deal of effort and equipment is required to realize the construction of these specialized roads, involving the use of heavy machinery to pack and grade the snow to appropriately safe levels for travel. This is especially true for the many roads which cross over lakes, as ensuring the proper level of ice thickness becomes a primary concern. While a thickness of 20 inches is appropriate for light traffic, 30 inches of heavy ice is required to handle tractor-trailers, which can reach a weight of 80,000 pounds on a full load. A variety of equipment is needed to build up lake surfaces to this point, including special pumps capable of flooding the ice at a rate of a gallon per minute, allowing for gradual inch-by-inch freezing.
Such work doesn’t come cheap; Mamakwa says the 474 kilometres of road that the Asheweig Winter Road Corporation is tasked with overseeing carries a price tag of $1.2 million.
While relatively costly, this remaining investment can be offset through the expected cost reductions of major construction components and fuel. However, when winter road usage is reduced, so too are the opportunities to bring in those key items.
Other problems with the winter road can arise when communities lack a large number of capital projects. While individual residents may end up making extensive use of the road to collect their own supplies and the like, the elevated costs of building the road may not be offset by any significant potential savings that stem from having to truck in large quantities of construction materials.
This sometimes can leave some people wondering whether the money might not have been better spent on smaller, individual capital projects.
“Sometimes, it’s not a money-maker,” Capon says. “It’s usually a money-loser because communities usually end up in deficit even though there’s a certain subsidy, because they still have to kick in and pay tolls and contribute community money, usually through their minor capital funding.”
