Stan Kapashesit grew up in the 1980s on the James Bay coast, and when he was a kid, travelling to see family and friends during Christmas was a given. He’d cross the Moose River over an ice road with his parents, making his way to Moosonee.
Looking back, he remembers the road always being ready by early December. This year, that same road didn’t open until the very end of December — and even then, it was open only to light loads, not the big trucks that bring supplies to town. After that, the temperatures spiked again, and it could only be crossed by snowmobile for about a week.
The road going further south — which connects Moosonee to the provincial highway system and first opened about a decade ago — didn’t open until Christmas. It didn't open for New Year's. It didn't open until a month later, the morning of January 29.
“It was open earlier, longer. It was just more accessible. Growing up here, living here, [I’m] just seeing the season get shorter and shorter,” said Kapashesit, while driving over the Moose River, a dusting of white snow trailing his black truck tires. It's a phenomenon First Nations in northern Ontario have long observed. Multiple people interviewed by Canada’s National Observer along the James Bay coast in March offered the same observation, which is supported by scientific studies, including an alarming report by the Canadian Climate Institute that found that half of Canada’s winter roads will be unusable in 30 years.
The roads that connect Moose Cree First Nation to the outside make up a portion of the weaving network of temporary ice roads connecting communities in Ontario to paved, permanent highways. Built up each year over frozen rivers, streams and muskeg, ice roads are vital throughways — food, medicine, fuel and people are all moved along them at a fraction of the price of flying, but their seasons are being squeezed due to rising temperatures caused by climate change. Kapashesit, who is associate executive director of Moose Cree First Nation, says they’re exploring the viability of building an all-season road, as is Fort Albany First Nation about 200 km north.
The cost of maintaining the road is inseparable from the pressures of climate change in northern Ontario, and both are mounting in tandem. The federal and provincial governments chip in money to construct and maintain winter roads in the province, but the First Nations who manage them are on the hook for remaining costs. Funding has not caught up to inflation rates.
Winter roads are invaluable to the First Nations they connect because they make goods cheaper, but those savings dwindle as the road season shrinks. In Neskantaga First Nation, an isolated community in the middle of the province, its winter road opened a full month earlier between 2008 and 2018: on Dec. 22 compared to Jan. 22. This year, according to updates posted on Facebook, it opened around the same day, on Jan. 19.
And while open and closing dates paint a telling picture of the winter road season, another revealing metric is the reduction in very cold days, specifically those -30 degrees Celsius or colder. Frigid conditions are necessary for constructing a road that can bear thousands of pounds, explains Sudbury-based geologist David Pearson — they cause the ice to thicken quickly, and make it safe for road builders to get out on the surface of the road.
Canada’s National Observer analyzed federal data from five weather stations in Ontario, four of which are in isolated communities that rely on winter roads, and found that there has been a significant reduction in -30 degrees Celsius days in communities that need them to build winter roads.
Meanwhile, a slew of climate change-related shifts are making the ice road system untenable, notes a 2023 report by Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN). Not only are warmer days forcing ice road opening dates to be later, but more snow and rain earlier in the winter “increases water levels and water movement speeds, resulting in slower freeze times of water crossings,” making maintaining the roads more challenging.
There isn’t one way to define a winter road season as viable, explained Canadian Climate Institute report co-author Ryan Ness. “It's generally assumed that a winter road is impassable in a particular month if the monthly average temperature is greater than -5 C,” said Ness, who explained that increased temperatures will continue to ratchet up in coming decades, making those months more common. Once there are only a few weeks cold enough to host the road, “it’s not cost-effective anymore to build them for the season,” he said.
“The discussion around an all-season road becomes ... is it more feasible to invest a million dollars every year to build the road that's gonna be open all year round, as opposed to just two months — at most,” said Kapashesit.
How many back-to-back, extreme cold days occur in future (what climate scientists refer to as Freezing Degree Days, or FDDs) depends on the amount of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions put into the atmosphere. A study by Climate Data mapped the number of FDDs under a high-emissions scenario. In Moose Cree First Nation, the accumulation of FDDs needed to construct an ice road is expected to arrive much later in the coming decades: by the 2070s, on average, there will be enough FDDs to build an ice road by mid-January, representing a 27-day push forward from the 1980s.
A study from York University came to a similar conclusion. It notes the lifespan of one-metre-thick ice required by transport trucks will become much shorter under all warming scenarios.
“For these trucks, our research shows that the number of days of safe ice will decline by 90 per cent with an increase of 1.5 C of global warming,” writes lead author Reader R. Iestyn Woolway.
That becomes a 95 per cent decline if the planet warms by 2 C — and a 99 per cent decline with a 3 C global temperature hike.
The shrinking season of the Wetum Road and others like it will only continue to dwindle, Pearson said. Ice roads are constructed and authorities gradually let heavier vehicles onto them as the road gets thicker, so the most revealing metric is when the roads open to full loads and can handle deliveries of goods.
This year on Feb. 21 — which is supposed to be in the thick of the winter road season — just seven of 33 stretches of winter roads in Ontario were open to full loads, according to an update from Indigenous Services Canada.
Using the precautionary principle — a scientific approach that says decisions should be based on the most severe scenario, even if there is uncertainty, due to potential harm — is essential when considering the future of ice roads, Pearson said.
“Using the 90th percentile means that there is no long-term future for winter roads in the North. The future is limited to, I think, sometime in the 2040s — max,” he said.
This is story three in a series Canada’s National Observer is producing on ice roads in Northern Ontario – in collaboration with I-SEA and The Donner Canadian Foundation.
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