Northern Ontario politicians are urgently appealing to the federal government for help during one of the deadliest winters on record along 2,000 kilometres of highway between Nipigon, Sudbury and North Bay.
In a letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney, the Northwestern Ontario Municipalities Association (NOMA) is urging the government to designate the stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway — both Highway 11 and Highway 17 — as dual-use national infrastructure.
That would tap into the federal government’s plan to spend more on defence-related infrastructure while fulfilling a years-old request from northwestern Ontarians to shore up the sole land connector between Eastern and Western Canada.
“We need to get the attention of the federal government to say: listen, we need you to invest,” said Rick Dumas, the mayor of Marathon, Ont., and president of the Northwestern Ontario Municipalities Association (NOMA).
For a signifigant portion of the highway between Thunder Bay and the Manitoba border, there isn’t really a ditch at the side of the road.
It is either vertical rock wall on one side, or vertical drop-off down a rocky cliff (or into a lake) on the other side.
Very little margin for error if you skid off the road.