Chinese Mining Company Gets $61 Million For Arctic Road; Who Pays? Canadian Taxpayers

A proposed road connecting Yellowknife to the Arctic Coast — cutting deep into caribou calving grounds while crossing 640 kilometres of thawing permafrost — has leapt closer to reality, with $61.5 million in new funding pledged this week from the federal government and the government of the Northwest Territories.

The road, first proposed in 2012 by MMG Limited, a multinational mining corporation whose major shareholder is the Chinese government, aims to open up remote areas to mining that would otherwise be too expensive to reach. So far, only small pockets of land close to Yellowknife and existing highways have been economically available for most mining. But biologists are worried about the impacts of the potential road and its associated development on the Arctic’s vulnerable land and marine ecosystems. The road could see nine new mines developed in the range of the Bathurst caribou herd, which is already in steep decline.

The project has a component on each side of the Nunavut/Northwest Territories border. In Nunavut, the $500 million “Grays Bay Road and Port Project” would be the first road connecting Nunavut to the rest of Canada. In the Northwest Territories, the “Slave Geological Province Corridor” is pegged at $1.1 billion.

On Tuesday the federal government pledged $21.5 million toward the first phase of development for the Grays Bay project through the National Trade Corridors Fund. The 230-kilometre road would connect a winter road servicing diamond mines in the Northwest Territories to a proposed deep-water port at Grays Bay on the Northwest Passage route. On Wednesday, another $30 million in federal funding was announced for the Slave geological corridor, along with $10 million from the Northwest Territories government.

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https://thenarwhal.ca/canadian-taxpayers-61-million-road-open-mining-arctic/