The Q&A: "Canada’s Arctic is the soft underbelly of North American defence"

The Northwest Territories' premier on roads, resources and federalism

NWT premier RJ Simpson (left, very tall) with others at the first ministers’ meeting. From his IG account.

In the consensus-driven legislature of the Northwest Territories, RJ Simpson has been premier for just over two years. He was in Ottawa for this week’s First Ministers’ Meeting, the fourth in-person gathering of federal, provincial and territorial heads of government since Mark Carney became prime minister last March.

Canada’s northern territories are getting more attention lately than they used to, because Donald Trump sometimes fancies northern real estate and because even if no property changes hands, the North offers substantial resource opportunities, significant security threats, and daunting development challenges. Simpson says he’s getting more traction in his talks with Ottawa these days, but it’ll take sustained engagement to make significant change.

As luck would have it, I was out of Ottawa while Simpson was in the capital. This conversation took place by Zoom and has been edited for length and clarity.

Paul Wells: In his closing remarks on Thursday, the Prime Minister said this is the fourth time the premiers have met in person since he became Prime Minister. That’s a lot of activity. What would you say is the main focus of these First Ministers’ Meetings?

RJ Simpson: The main focus is keeping Team Canada strong. The value is getting everyone on the same page. The trade war and issues with the United States have really spurred that on. We get updates from the Prime Minister, hear what other jurisdictions are doing to open new markets, and talk about what we can do internally in Canada—both interprovincial trade and our international trade situation. That’s primarily the focus.

PW: Are these decision-making meetings? Do you vote?

Simpson: No. The Council of the Federation and First Ministers’ meetings aren’t decision-making forums. They’re places where the Prime Minister listens. I’ve worked with two prime ministers now, and I can say there’s a different approach. There’s real interest in what premiers are saying, notes are taken, and you can see later positions informed by those discussions. They’re not decision-making, but they are productive.

PW: That suggests an unflattering comparison with his predecessor. Tell me more.

Simpson: It’s just different approaches. Trudeau wasn’t known for bringing the premiers together. It really only happened in the last few months of his term. It was a little more difficult to get in touch with him, and you hear that even from his former ministers. It’s just a different way of doing business.

PW: Is the tone of this latest meeting calmer and more reassured than it might have been if Trump hadn’t climbed down from open confrontation over Greenland at Davos? Does that give you guys more room to breathe?

Simpson: Yes, I’d say so. If we were talking about NATO members invoking Article Five and going to war, it would have been a very different meeting. The threat is still there, though. There’s global instability—military threats and economic coercion—and that’s always present at these meetings. We understand that. It is the world we’re living in. It’s what we have to deal with.

PW: Stephen Harper used to say about the North, “Use it or lose it.” Some people thought that was a terribly mercenary view of things but it’s turning out to have some truth in it. Do you think the rest of Canada is asserting sovereignty sufficiently in your territory?

Simpson: We’re doing a better job now than before. When I think of sovereignty, I think if someone from outside of Canada will look at a region and say, “OK, that’s Canada,” they’ve asserted their sovereignty. So really, it’s the people of the territory asserting the sovereignty for Canada here, because we don’t have a lot of infrastructure, so it really is the daily activities of people. But that’s changing now that the Department of National Defense is making significant investments in two military installations that already exist in the territory: the Joint Task Force North headquarters in Yellowknife, and then the NORAD Forward Operating location in Inuvik. That’s going to go a long way in advancing the discussion about Canada’s security.

When all the premiers went to Washington, we met with a lot of lawmakers and business leaders. Canada has many allies there, both Republican and Democrat. One thing almost everyone agreed on is that Canada’s Arctic is the soft underbelly of North American defence and needs to be dealt with. So when there’s Democrats or Republican lawmakers who are confronting the issue of Canada’s sovereignty and all the rhetoric that’s happening, they can be assured by the fact that we are making investments.

PW: I assume you still have a wish list of things you’d like to see started or sped up. What does that look like?

Simpson: Yes, and they all relate to sovereignty as well. I try not to speak too much about national security, because that’s federal jurisdiction and I’m not the expert on that. But the Mackenzie Valley Highway is a major project that’s been talked about since Diefenbaker’s time. We’ve built maybe a couple hundred kilometres in the last 60 years, and there are still about 700 kilometres to go.

Right now, to travel north you have to go through British Columbia and the Yukon, often over mountain passes that can be closed due to blizzards, before re-entering the Northwest Territories. That’s a concern from a security standpoint, and it also affects communities—especially as climate change affects river shipping. A couple of years ago, the river was too low to ship anything for the first time ever.

Another project is the Arctic Economic and Security Corridor, which the Prime Minister has been referencing since before he took office. It would run from the Yellowknife area through the Slave Geological Province, one of the most mineral-rich areas in the world, where our diamond mines and critical minerals are located. Then that would connect to Nunavut — which would be Nunavut’s first ever connection to another territory — and then it would go up to Grays Bay, and Nunavut is proposing to have a port there. That would create, on the east and the west, two new connections to the Arctic and the Arctic Ocean, which I think Canada, as an Arctic nation, needs.

The third project is upgrading and expanding our hydro system to connect disconnected grids and support economic development, including mining, along that corridor.

Those are our three major projects that we’d like to see advanced. The Arctic Economic Security Corridor is not as advanced as the Mackenzie Valley highway, but we’re still making progress on that. It’s actually a couple of the First Nations, whose land that would be built on, who are the proponents. And we’ve just signed an MOU with them to formalize that relationship. But the Mackenzie Valley highway is ready to go. We have good support up and down that region from all of the Indigenous groups, and we have some things permitted already. We could get shovels in the ground tomorrow and start this work, and then by the time we get out of the environmental assessment for the first phase of that road, we’d be ready to start on that and be ready to start looking at phase two, which would connect all the way up to Inuvik in the Arctic.

PW: Are you facing delays related to regulation? Are there cases in which the feds or some other jurisdictions are in the way of development?

Simpson: In the Northwest Territories, Bill C-5 doesn’t apply. Bill C-5 allows the federal government to modify the requirements under certain acts, but not the federal act that governs our regulatory system. In the territory, we have the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act, which is a federal piece of legislation that creates a regulatory regime that is co-managed. The federal government, the government of the Northwest Territories and the Indigenous governments in that region appoint members to the board that makes decisions on things like environmental assessment. It is a one-project, one-review system, and there is definitely ways to streamline that system, and we’re working on that.

We’re not looking at wholesale changes, because the act implements sections out of modern treaties. But there are ways to streamline it. For example, regulatory boards currently need federal approval just to obtain legal advice, which can take weeks or months. Those kinds of delays add up. More federal involvement and better support for Indigenous participation would help move projects along more quickly, and we’re working toward an MOU on that.

PW: What’s the level of private developer interest in these projects and in developing the territory in general?

Simpson: We don’t have the infrastructure to really attract a lot of industry to the territory. That’s our big issue. We have enormous resources — about a third of Canada’s conventional natural gas and a third of its light, marketable crude — but we don’t have the infrastructure to access them. We’re still working on the public infrastructure part, like the Mackenzie Valley Highway. That’s a piece of public infrastructure that will then help spur development.

We have had interest from big conglomerates who want to come in and build it, and they try to make money off the government, not off the resources. When it comes to the Arctic Economic Security Corridor, that’s a very specific economic case. If there’s mineral exploration companies going up there, and mines going up there, there’s opportunities to charge a toll on that road and then bring in some revenue. Once that project advances, I suspect that we’re going to be getting some more interest from private developers or private investors.

PW: But that’s still years away?

Simpson: There’s been a lot of work on that project, but when we came in at the beginning of this government, one First Nation initially said the project was a non-starter. And I said, well, then I guess it’s a non-starter for me too, because the days of just bulldozing projects through against Indigenous opposition are over. Instead, we’ve turned things around completely. That Indigenous government is now one of the two proponents of the project, and so they are going to be working to advance it and determining a route because it goes through a caribou migration area. I can’t over-emphasize the importance of both caribou and water in the Northwest Territories. Those are two things that are the heart of the culture in the territory. With that new proponent in place, and an aggressive timeline, it will advance more quickly. By the time we’re done building on Mackenzie Valley Highway, the other one should be ready to go.

PW: When I think about the Northwest Territories, I kind of remind myself how big it is. It’s vast. It’s larger than every province except Quebec, which is about the same size. It’s twice the size of Texas. It’s bigger than France, Spain and Portugal put together. It seems hard to imagine that you would soon get to a point where President Trump, or a President Vance, or a President Stephen Miller would stop thinking it’s not a serious part of Canada and it needs to be a serious part of the United States. Is that something that still keeps you up at night?

Simpson: I think that’s the same issue that all of Canada’s facing. I don’t see anyone coming and taking over the Northwest Territories militarily, unless they’re trying to do the same thing to the rest of Canada, because it’s not an environment that is inviting. There was an old saying back when they were concerned with the Russians: if the Russians invade on our north coast, the first thing we have to do is send out a search party to rescue them, because it’s not the kind of terrain that’s conducive to that. There’s not the kind of infrastructure that you would want to capture and then create a base from. I’m not so concerned about any sort of military intervention in the territory. It’s more the broader threat to Canada that’s the concern.

PW: Do you see evidence of Russian or Chinese activity in your neighbourhood?

Simpson: We’ve seen Chinese companies with state connections purchasing stakes in rare-earth mining companies and reaching out to Indigenous governments. Given China’s control over critical minerals and rare earth elements, they have an economic interest in ensuring there’s not development of those resources elsewhere. And I think it is something to be concerned about, to be aware of. One red flag was an email sent to all MLAs from a Chinese company proposing that they test their drones across every community in the territory. I think we do see things like that, but it’s not something that’s out in the open, as I imagine it wouldn’t be if they were trying to do something like that.

PW: As you head home, what’s next on your to-do list? What notes are you leaving with the feds to consider for immediate consideration?

Simpson: The Mackenzie Valley Highway. We’re permitted to do the work, so we can get shovels in the ground immediately, starting community engagement. I’m impressing upon the feds that we’re ready to go with that project. If they want to show that Canada is building out the North, that’s the way to do it. The Prime Minister especially has been very receptive. I can tell that he understands that the way the North is seen as the soft underbelly of North American security, and that needs to change, and that we need infrastructure on the ground, boots on the ground. I feel comfortable with their interest in our projects, and that attention is being paid. But I’m not taking it for granted, and we need to stay on top of that.