News

By Matt Prokopchuk, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Source: NWOnewswatch.com

The federal government should improve the Trans-Canada through northern Ontario as part of committed military spending.

That’s according to the Northwestern Ontario Municipal Association, the organization that represents and lobbies for 37 municipalities in the Northwest.

Its president, Rick Dumas, sent a letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney and other senior ministers, including federal Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon, requesting a meeting to discuss designating Highways 11 and 17 “as dual-use national infrastructure corridors,” and improving them in the name of, not only civilian transportation, but also national defence.

“The reality is, this approach, we looked at the Carney government announcing that they want to increase the GDP of Canada spending militarily-wise to five per cent under NATO commitments,” Dumas said in an interview.

“We support that, but at the same time, we support spending money in our backyard.”

The Carney government has made several multi-billion-dollar commitments in recent months with the aim of improving Canada’s national defence capabilities.

Echoing rationale U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower used when he championed construction of the American Interstate Highway system after the Second World War, Dumas said having a strong trans-national road transportation network is also crucial to national defence, in addition to other connectivity benefits.

“As Canada evaluates the infrastructure required to support a stronger defence posture, it is essential that the transportation corridors that move people, equipment and supplies across the country are considered part of that national framework,” Dumas’s letter said.

“Designating Highways 11 and 17 as dual-use infrastructure would acknowledge the strategic role these routes play in supporting both civilian mobility and defence readiness.”

Dumas, also the mayor of Marathon, reiterated that the combined Highway 11/17 corridor through Nipigon is the only true road link joining Canada’s eastern and western halves, and cited the 2016 failure of the then-new Nipigon River Bridge that caused a complete severing of the Trans-Canada for nearly 17 hours before a series of temporary measures allowed partial reopenings.

He also pointed to the Trans-Canada paralleling the Canada-U.S. border for about 900 kilometres through the region.

“The corridor therefore carries added importance for border awareness, emergency response and national security logistics while also supporting the movement of goods and people between Canada’s regions,” Dumas said in his letter.

“This is a perfect fit for our highways to be improved for the movement of our military, movement of our people and the safety of all residents and all commercial vehicles travelling up and down the highway,” Dumas added during his interview with Newswatch.

Aside from using defence spending to improve the existing highways themselves — something NOMA has long and repeatedly advocated for — Dumas said it’s also an opportunity to revive exploring the construction of a second highway through the region, proposing a route north of Lake Nipigon.

After the failure of the Nipigon River Bridge a decade ago, the province began studying the potential for a second highway as a redundancy to the combined 11/17 corridor — even by late 2018, identifying several potential alternative routes — but that work was subsequently abandoned. An MTO spokesperson told Newswatch in 2020 that another bridge closure was highly unlikely, and that “an alternative route across the river no longer needs to be considered.”

“The reality is we need to invest right here in our infrastructure, our critical infrastructure, in Northwestern Ontario that connects Canada,” Dumas said. “So, we’ll make that argument.”

“If, for whatever reason, anything ever happens to that piece of infrastructure, literally, we’re broke in half.”

Highway safety through the north has also been the focus of a nearly 4,000-kilometre road trip by New Democrat MPPs Sol Mamakwa (Kiiwetinoong), John Vanthof (Timiskaming-Cochrane) and Guy Bourgouin (Mushkegowuk-James Bay), including an open house featuring NDP leader Marit Stiles in Thunder Bay on March 9.

Vanthof has pledged to table a motion when the Ontario legislature resumes, calling for the Trans-Canada corridors through northern Ontario to be “a project of provincial significance,” and, in turn, for the provincial government to work with Ottawa to make it a national priority.

Progressive Conservative Thunder Bay-Atikokan MPP Kevin Holland said he continues to advocate for improving highway safety.

Dumas said the goal is to get everyone on board.

“Let’s bring the infrastructure minister, the transportation minister and the prime minister together at the same table and have a discussion,” he said.

“How do we be the conduit — Northwestern (and) northeastern Ontario … with the provincial and federal governments and talk about the importance of this critical link throughout Canada, which is Northwestern Ontario highways.”

(File photo)

Three people are facing charges after two homes in Shubenacadie were searched during an investigation under the Animal Protection Act.

The SPCA says in September, 27 animals were seized and 32 charges were laid, including 19 under the Act.

Two men and one woman from Centre Burlington, aged 52, 51 and 45, are scheduled to be in court May 11.

John Chilibeck, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

A new proposal is on the table to tap into New Brunswick’s vast natural gas reserves, without using the controversial method that’s been off-putting to many people – fracking.

It’s a plan that could eventually unlock hundreds of millions in wealth, make the province less dependent on handouts from Ottawa, enrich First Nations and create jobs. But it would also likely displease people concerned about burning more greenhouse gases and dangerously warming the planet.

The pitch is from veteran oil and gas executive Jim Livingstone, who owns RC Energy in Alberta and says he has developed a cleaner method of drilling than fracking. Hydraulic fracturing, which uses vast quantities of water and chemicals to break up deep, tight shale beds and retrieve gas, has been the subject of a moratorium in New Brunswick since 2014 because of environmental concerns.

One First Nation leader, Terry Richardson, is so enthused by the proposal that he’s arranged for Livingstone to speak to the province’s nine Mi’kmaq chiefs on March 18 about a business opportunity to drill 10 wells as a pilot project just south of Moncton, at Stoney Creek, part of their traditional territory.

The First Nations would put the money in for an ownership stake and reap profits, while the provincial government would win royalties. The private meeting is planned to take place in Moncton.

“This could be huge, not just for First Nations, but the entire province,” said Richardson, the unabashedly pro-development chief of Oinpegitjoig, or Pabineau First Nation, who has at times butted heads with other Indigenous leaders over developing natural resources. “This could be the game changer, in my mind. This would be the thing to take us to the next level.”

However, there would likely be blow back from people worried about greenhouse gases such as the opposition Green Party. While supporters, most notably former Progressive Conservative premier Blaine Higgs, say natural gas can be used as a transition fuel to wean the planet from more polluting coal, natural gas still adds significantly to global warming, with estimates suggesting it contributes about one-fifth of greenhouse gases worldwide.

New Brunswick has a huge reserve of unconventional natural gas, most of it unexploited. Geologists estimate there are nearly 70 trillion cubic feet of the resource underground in the province, mostly locked in shale beds.

To give that perspective, Alberta has nearly double that amount, 130 trillion cubic feet of proven reserves, an industry that’s already well developed and whose extraction, thanks to the federal government’s equalization payments across Canada, indirectly ends up funding a good chunk of New Brunswick’s public services in a so-called “have-not” province.

When David Alward’s Progressive Conservative government tried to encourage gas companies to frack in New Brunswick 15 years ago, opposition quickly mounted from First Nations and environmental groups.

The issue came to a head in October 2013, when RCMP tried to remove a blockade near Rexton in eastern New Brunswick led by people from the Mi’kmaq community of Elsipogtog and their supporters, who were trying to stop the company Southwestern Energy Resources (SWN) from doing exploratory testing for the gas.

A massive confrontation ensued, with dozens arrested and several RCMP vehicles torched. SWN eventually left the province, never to return.

A modest amount of gas production – 35 million cubic feet a day – continues to this day at the McCully field in Penobsquis, thanks to a special exemption to the fracking moratorium that the provincial government allowed for the Sussex area, where the resource was discovered 26 years ago. The first wells were drilled in 2003, and the gas began flowing to the main pipeline in 2007.

Headwater Exploration, whose headquarters are in Calgary, owns the production facility and runs a natural gas processing plant and a 50-km transmission line connected to the Maritimes and Northeast pipeline, with the product heading to the rich Boston market. It runs only in the winter, when natural gas prices are high.

Livingstone, who graduated in economics from Dalhousie University in 1973, said the same sort of controversial fracking method used in Pennsylvania or North Dakota wouldn’t have worked in most of New Brunswick’s shale gas play anyway.

“My technology does not involve fracking,” Livingstone said in an interview. “The debate over fracking, you didn’t have to have it. You can’t frack there because it doesn’t work. That’s not just me saying it. It’s the experts.”

The executive pointed to a 2012 study commissioned by the Petroleum Technology Association of Canada, which hired a top consulting firm, ALL Consulting, out of Oklahoma, to look at every shale gas play in North America.

“They flagged the shales in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and said they couldn’t be fracked because of the high clay content that would be sensitive to water,” Livingstone said. “Technically, you can’t do it. Most people didn’t know this.”

The report, which is more than 200 pages long, briefly mentions the Frederick Brook shale in New Brunswick, the region in southeastern New Brunswick, mostly in the Elgin and Sussex areas, that has an estimated 67 trillion cubic feet of gas, much of it locked between shale rock deposits more than one kilometre below the surface.

While the report doesn’t explicitly state that fracking won’t work in the region, it does note that the area features very high clay content, averaging 42 per cent underground.

“Based on seismic data and results of the wells that have been drilled, additional development of the resource in the future is likely,” it states, only one year before protests would set the industry back more than a decade.

Livingstone says his technology was developed in co-operation with Nabors Industries, which owns the world’s second largest land drilling rig fleet, with more than 250 rigs in 20 countries.

First Nations, he says, call it air-drilling or waterless drilling. Livingstone prefers the technical term, reverse-circulation centred discharge drilling, using a double-walled drill pipe, highly regarded in the industry for dealing with difficult ground conditions.

The set up also uses far less water than fracking and doesn’t cause as much air pollution, according to Totan, a rival drilling firm in China that uses similar technology.

Livingstone runs 51 wells, from El Paso, Texas, near the Mexican border, all the way to High Level, Alberta, 700 km north of Edmonton.

“My technology is not of interest to the other shale plays in North America, because other companies are going to frack them. Fracking gives you bigger volumes of gas, and you get your gas right away. It’s easier. But you don’t have that option in New Brunswick or Nova Scotia.

“You have lake shales. Trying to frack lake shale is like trying to frack peanut butter. You can’t do it. The other shale formations, from ancient oceans, are like peanut brittle, they’re hard and can be fracked.”

His proposal envisions First Nation communities being the major shareholder, fronting the money to get the operation running, with the two sides splitting the profits down the middle, what he described as a typical farm-in for such ventures.

The executive, who once ran Gulf Canada’s oil exploration on the Beaufort Sea in the Arctic in the 1980s, was bullish on trying to convince Indigenous leaders that natural gas development in New Brunswick was a good idea.

“I go back 40 years working with First Nations in northern Canada,” he said. “My technology was used in the Blackfoot Indian Reservation in northern Montana. I had a 50-year deal with them on 500,000 acres down there.

“I’m very confident I could convince the First Nations to develop the gas.”

By Sandi Krasowski, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Source: The Chronicle-Journal

Conference registration, and trade show exhibitor booth and hotel reservations are now underway for the Northwestern Ontario Municipal Association (NOMA) Conference and Annual General Meeting that will take place April 22-24 in Thunder Bay.

This year’s conference theme is resilience, which reflects the realities facing Northwestern Ontario communities in 2026 and beyond.

Jason Veltri, executive coordinator for NOMA, said in 2026, resilience is more than a concept and called it a necessity for Northern communities.

“From housing pressures and infrastructure gaps to workforce challenges, climate impacts, emergency preparedness, and economic uncertainty, municipalities across the region continue to demonstrate resilience in the face of ongoing change,” Veltri said. “Municipal governments continue to navigate complex and evolving pressures affecting housing, infrastructure, energy, health care, and community well-being.”

He added that the conference is designed to support leaders by sharing practical tools, collective knowledge, and meaningful dialogue that can strengthen the ability to adapt, innovate, and thrive together.

Throughout the conference, there will be a strong focus on issues critical to the region. This includes housing and local infrastructure, mining and energy development, environmental resilience and emergency preparedness, leadership, health, and community well-being. Over the two days, there will be opportunities to participate in workshops, panels, and a full trade show showcasing services, innovations, and solutions relevant to municipal governments and Northern communities.

Rick Dumas, NOMA president, says their board of directors is excited about this year’s conference.

“We are looking forward to an engaging and thought-provoking program that brings people together, challenges ideas, and reflects the resilience and determination of Northwestern Ontario communities,” he told The Chronicle-Journal.

The conference will also feature a strong lineup of keynote speakers, which includes Marci Ien, former member of Parliament, federal cabinet minister and award-winning journalist. Also featured is former Alberta premier Rachel Notley, who will speak about resilience, leadership, and navigating change in challenging political and economic environments.

Early registration rates are now available for a limited time. Veltri reminds businesses that trade show exhibitor space is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. Register for the conference or an exhibitor booth online at noma.on.ca.

By Matt Prokopchuk, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Source: NWOnewswatch.com

Ontario First Nations leaders continue to push for resources to improve housing.

That’s according to Ontario Regional Chief Abram Benedict, who helped open the 23rd edition of the First Nations Housing Conference on Tuesday.

“Before the tariff war that has impacted … the economy in different ways, the Government of Canada was grappling with a housing shortage,” he said. “And, sadly, for many of our communities, the housing shortage, inadequate housing, overcrowded housing is nothing new.”

“We’ve had a crisis in our communities for a very long time.”

The conference brings together community leaders, housing managers, government funding agencies, builders and maintenance people, industry representatives and more to work to improve housing in First Nations through an Indigenous-led lens.

Benedict said gathering such a wide range of expertise in one place is a chance to learn and “to talk about the opportunities and the resilience that we have, together.”

Overall, though, he said making way on ensuring First Nations have the same standard of essentials like housing, clean water and electricity, “it seems like we’re continuing to push a boulder up a hill.”

Statistics published by Canada’s auditor general back the regional chief’s statement.

A 2024 report cited a study from three years prior by the Assembly of First Nations that found, Canada-wide, closing the housing gap (the state of housing as it existed in 2021 versus what is needed) was $44 billion.

That includes over 55,000 new units for homes that need replacement and to address overcrowding, another 78,000 new units for members returning to First Nations, repairing over 80,000 existing units, and providing services like water, wastewater and electricity to 112,000 lots.

“The report also estimated that an additional $16 billion would be needed for future housing needs related to population growth from 2022 to 2040,” the auditor general’s findings said.

The auditor general did also note that subsequent work by the Assembly of First Nations and Indigenous Services Canada found that $44 billion figure had roughly tripled due to inflation, significant increases in construction costs and additional factors that had not been previously considered, like climate change adaptation, energy efficiency and other maintenance.

Benedict also pointed to the importance of ensuring housing supports for members both on and off-reserve.

“It’s difficult to meet the needs in the community, it’s much more difficult to meet the needs of members outside of the community,” he said. “But they’re equally important parts of our nations.”

“Many of them want to be in our community but can’t for a lot of reasons.”

In his speech, Benedict referenced infrastructure improvements that senior levels of government have promised will happen alongside resource development in areas like the Ring of Fire “which are important to all of us.”

“But making sure that we’re doing that responsibly, we’re also making sure when we’re doing that, we’re doing that with community safety, community wellness at the front.”

“We want to make sure that we’re not compromising our jurisdiction, the jurisdiction of our communities and the sovereignty of our community in advance of that.”