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“Canadian taxpayers have been paying for highways in the southern part of Canada,” Anablak says. “Our organization’s trying to create jobs that are badly needed up here.”

The first all-weather road across the Arctic Circle, the Dempster Highway, was a 20-year project completed in 1979, fulfilling former prime minister John Diefenbaker’s vision for an accessible Arctic two days after he died.

Photo by Ben Nelms/Bloomberg

The estimated cost of constructing the new highway from Yellowknife is $1 billion, but the cost is uncertain due to the challenge of building on melting permafrost.

“The problem with (permafrost) is, if you tear into it just like you do a regular road-building project, you’ll wind up with just a bunch of melting mud,” says Lake Pickell, general manager of Arctic Construction, a contractor with headquarters in British Columbia that has built all-weather roads in the Yukon. “You might have a big grassy plain, and it looks quite beautiful, but if you tear into it … it’ll start to thaw out, and then now it’s black, and it’s thawing, and the sun’s being attracted to it, and you’ve created this open sore in the tundra.”

The highway would require contractors to lay down geotextile matting to prevent the off-site material from mixing with the native soil, says Pickell. He says this type of road could withstand melting permafrost and can even be built atop swamps. To avoid digging into the permafrost, contractors would haul material from off-site and use a bulldozer to compress it.

“You dump, and you ‘doze, and you keep just working your way ahead,” he says.

Correction, Sept. 4: This story has been corrected to note that contractors could use geotextile matting to prevent off-site material from mixing with the native soil. The matting would not circulate cool air to the ground below. Incorrect information appeared in the print edition of the National Post.