As ice road melts, a First Nation eyes solid ground
Two years ago, the snowy scene outside the window next to Terry Metatawabin looked much different. Soot was hitting the glass, bright orange combined with black smoke taking over any natural sky – “like watching a volcano.”
“We evacuated everybody in 24 hours. The whole community,” said Metatawabin, deputy chief of Fort Albany First Nation, a community nestled on the southern shore of the Albany River, which pours into James Bay.
“I remember somebody running in here. They were saying, ‘It's coming towards us,'” added Chief Elizabeth Kataquapit, remembering the scene at their office during a huge wildfire in 2023.
Water bombers came and saved the community of about 1,500. There were back-to-back evacuations in Fort Albany that spring: first, due to flooding, and then, prompted by the wildfire. As the multiple climate-change impacts the community experiences only stand to intensify, the First Nation is determined to move forward on a plan more ambitious than anything they’ve tackled before: a permanent road from Fort Albany to the south.
Like about 30 other communities in Ontario, Fort Albany First Nation is isolated. There are no permanent gravel or paved roads linking it to the provincial highway system. Planes are the only way in or out, outside the winter road season.
An all-season road would mean the community has “an escape plan,” during extreme weather events, said Metatawabin.
Most goods that make their way into Fort Albany have to travel along a winter road — temporary passages built up over frozen rivers, streams and muskeg — within about a six-week timeframe. It’s early March, and at the entry to Fort Albany First Nation, a modular office unit sits wrapped in plastic, driven up the day before on the winter road. Transporting goods, like food and fuel, on the road is significantly cheaper than flying them in. People cram as many visits to family and friends as they can in the two-month season.
“It's a bloodline, and when it opens up, just for that two months, so many things happen, so many stories: weddings, transportation, new homes, new construction,” said Metatawabin. “It's just that two months that we get that breathing room to leave.”
The community just approved a new youth centre and a 100-lot housing development, which is all “coming on the winter road,” said Kataquapit. At a meeting the night before, they’d made the decision to rush whatever material they can for the housing development within the remainder of the winter road season so they can take advantage of building in the spring and summer. Without that choice, they’d be waiting almost another year to get materials. “It's a lot of pressure on us and our financial system,” explains Metatawabin.
The last major building project in Fort Albany was the school, which opened in 2002. The big difference then was that the community still had barge access – but river levels have been too low in the years since for barge service.
The closest community south of Fort Albany is Moosonee, which, while still isolated from the provincial highway system, is significantly more connected. It is the northernmost terminus for Ontario Northland's Polar Bear Express, a train that brings in food, goods and people year-round. For Fort Albany residents, the two to four-hour drive to Moosonee provides them with cheaper goods at the store or picked up from the railway station. Some will go even further, as far as Sudbury or even a full-day drive to Toronto, once they reach the highway, to stock up on food, fuel and clothing for the year, said Metatawabin.
That’s why it’s so quiet in the community when Canada’s National Observer is visiting, he says, because the “final hype” of the last few weeks of the winter road is prompting everyone to funnel south.
Meanwhile, a bare-bones ticket for the roundtrip flight from Fort Albany to Timmins is about $900, while the more flexible fare is about double the cost. Then, there’s the cost of a car rental, hotel, and the goods purchased, says Metatawabin. Because of the high price, Fort Albany has started investing in shipping containers, which are stocked with goods brought on the winter road to try and cut back on flying things in.
The uncertainty and cost, the risk and volatility, all add up to a single question for the community, one that’s much harder to answer than it is to ask:
“Why pay a plane service three times the price when you can build that road?” says Metatawabin.
Reasons for the road
While the winter road season is inherently narrow, it is becoming less viable as climate change causes the ice to melt sooner and freeze later. Research has found that half of Canada’s winter roads will be unusable in 30 years. Kataquapit has seen the shift first-hand over her lifetime and says paying to construct a road each year just for it to melt away isn’t sustainable. Along the James Bay Coast, each First Nation is responsible for building and maintaining their section of the winter road: for Fort Albany, that means the 175-km stretch to Moosonee, to the south.
Each year, about $400,000 is spent on that section alone, part of which comes from the federal and provincial governments, and the rest from Fort Albany First Nation. The nearby Victor diamond mine put forward a significant chunk of the funding for the entirety of the James Bay Winter Road – which runs from Attawapiskat to Moosonee – until it finished decommission work after closing in 2019. Road manager Nancy Wood told Canada’s National Observer that there is some money in the coffers saved from the mine, but it’s set to run out in the next couple of years, making the future funding structure uncertain.
While climate change and funding challenges put the viability of the ice road into question, Kataquapit said a slew of reasons justify the construction of an all-season road. There are obvious issues like affordability – the closer you get to bigger centres, the cheaper products are. Metatawabin remembers a time when a case of bottled water that cost $5 in Moosonee was $55 in Fort Albany, which had a boil water advisory at the time.
Access to healthcare is another major driver, she explains. A $1.8-billion hospital is currently being built in Moosonee and is expected to be open by the end of the decade, and Kataquapit wants her community to be able to access it year-round.
“We fly from here to Timmins, and then Timmins to Kingston ... this new hospital is going to eliminate that,” said Metatawabin. “Instead of doing all that air travel, just build that road, right? Because when people go for their cancer treatments, diabetes treatments, that travel to Kingston is very, very hard.”
Waking it up again
This isn’t the first time the conversation around building an all-season road has come up. In 2020, Mushkegowuk Council put out a feasibility study on an all-season road route, to which the communities of Attawapiskat, Kashechewan, Fort Albany, and Moose Factory all contributed .
It highlighted many of the same benefits Metatawabin and Kataquapit say a road would bring to Fort Albany — along with the difficulties. Chief among them was geology. The study found the road from Kashechewan to Moosonee would require 70 bridges and 100 additional medium and large-diameter culverts to span watercourses and muskeg conditions.
Following the study, “it kind of went to bed for a while, but I'm gonna try to wake it up again,” said Kataquapit. To her, that means moving forward on building a permanent road between Fort Albany and Moosonee, and hoping other First Nations in the area follow suit and build their sections – transforming the entirety of the current winter road route into a permanent one.
If a road is eventually built along the James Bay Coast, the community would be accessible in a way it isn’t now. Metatawabin points to a white sedan plopped near the airport on Dimick Road, and explains that it had flipped the day before on the winter road. The driver was illegally transporting drugs from Brampton to the region. He acknowledges that an all-season road would make his community more accessible – for better and worse – and putting in checkpoints, like some other communities have, could be a way to tackle the issue.
“The Elders told me, when you open that door, be ready, but don't open it unexpectedly. Plan for it when you're opening that kind of opportunity,” he said.
Mining roads
Later that afternoon, Metatawabin stands on the Albany River. Without tree coverage on either side, the wind is sharp and strong. In a couple of months, it will seem impossible to imagine big trucks driving over it – people will boat on the crossing between Kashechewan and Fort Albany.
He talks about the other major challenge that comes with building an all-season road: the resource projects that will likely be required to pay for it.
Building permanent roads costs serious cash. Back in 2016, a permanent road connecting communities along the coast of James Bay was earmarked at $500 to 700 million – a number that has no doubt ballooned now that almost a decade has passed. First Nations are forced to consider resource projects to fund a permanent road in the absence of provincial and federal support.
Jacinthe Goulet, spokesperson for Indigenous Services Canada, said the department is working on feasibility and routing studies of all-season roads for “approximately 12 remote Ontario First Nations communities across various corridors.” In Budget 2024, $45 million was put forward toward a project that is connecting Pikangikum First Nation to the provincial highway system, which in turn, will “strengthen the winter road network to six other communities.” There is a major lithium mining project on the table for the region, and the developer has said permanent roads funded by the federal government are necessary.
Fort Albany First Nation, along with 14 other First Nations in the region, are participating in a federal assessment of the Ring of Fire mining region – a mineral deposit rich with chromite, cobalt and nickel that could play a role in Ontario’s ambitions for an electric-vehicle supply chain and Canada’s critical minerals strategy. A road to the region and transmission lines have been proposed to access the area. Ontario Premier Doug Ford called the road network a “gateway” to the province’s mineral rush.
The assessment comes with hesitation and some clear opposition. Last year, several First Nations took the province to court over an outdated mining claim system at the same time as the Ontario Chiefs called for a one-year pause on claims. The decade-long push to mine the area, which is home to the world’s second-largest terrestrial carbon sink, has been strongly opposed by some First Nations. Meanwhile, Pierre Poilievre's promise last month to fast-track development of the region was quickly criticized by Nishnawbe Aski Nation Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler.
Multiple First Nations, who have vocally opposed the Ring of Fire (such as Neskantaga First Nation), have signed onto the assessment, and Metatawabin stresses it is not a greenlight for the project, but a way for the community to get an idea of the project’s impact.
“We want to understand what the risks are involved here ... it's gonna change the waterways,” he said.
There have been attempts to access the carbon-rich muskeg in the past for carbon sequestration projects the First Nation rejected, because companies weren’t able to show the First Nation that they would do so in an environmentally responsible way, said Metatawabin.
Now, Metatawabin and Kataquapit are tasked with getting the support of their community. If they move forward with building an all-season road, they want the majority on board, which Metatawabin thinks is possible.
“If you asked 20 years ago, I would say no,” Metatawabin said, as the seasonal road prepares to shut down nearly a month earlier than it would have back then. “Today, I would say yes.”
– With files from Matteo Cimellaro
This is story two of a four-part series Canada’s National Observer is producing on ice roads in Northern Ontario – in collaboration with I-SEA and The Donner Foundation.
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