THUNDER BAY — Stories from people travelling northern Ontario’s highways will be used to pressure the Ford government to make improvements.
That’s according to the opposition NDP’s leadership, including party leader Marit Stiles, who was in Thunder Bay for a standing-room-only public forum on Monday, where residents shared their experiences — including tragedies and close calls — on area highways.
“What I heard tonight was people saying how many more people have to die, how long do we have to live with fear when our family members are off to just work every day that they may not come home,” Stiles told reporters after the roughly two-and-a-half-hour meeting.
“That’s not something anybody in this province or this country should have to live with.”
The party’s house leader, Timiskaming-Cochrane MPP John Vanthof, said he will table a motion at Queen’s Park when the legislature resumes in late March, calling for the government to declare Highways 11 and 17 (and the shared 11/17 corridor) “a project of provincial significance,” and, in turn, to work with Ottawa to make it a national priority.
That is scheduled to be debated some time in April, he said.
Vanthof co-sponsored a private members bill by his colleague, Mushkegowuk-James Bay MPP Guy Bourgouin, in 2025 that aimed to address a number of long-standing concerns about highway safety. Those included expanding hours for inspection stations, more traffic enforcement and bringing transport truck driver testing and certification, as well as winter highway maintenance, back into the public sector.
It was defeated by the majority Progressive Conservatives in late 2025.
Stiles said a roughly week-long trek by three of her northern Ontario MPPs, along the Trans-Canada from Toronto to the Manitoba boundary and back, is part of efforts to shine an even brighter spotlight on the highway safety issue and bring northern Ontario residents’ concerns directly to Queen’s Park.
“We are going to really ramp it up,” she said. “That’s why we’re doing this tour right now, because we think that enough is enough, that the government has to feel the pressure to actually take action now.”
And given both provincial and federal governments are prioritizing “nation-building” and other large-scale development projects, Stiles said the timing is perfect.
“After the last federal election, when the prime minister said we want nation building projects, we, … over a year ago, said to the premier, one of those priorities should be Highways 11 and 17,” Stiles said. “If (Premier Doug Ford) can’t see that it’s just bad enough that people are losing their lives and families are torn apart, then maybe he’ll see the logic in the fact that our economy is being ground to a halt multiple times a day with the shutdown of those highways.”
“There’s no way the road through the Ring of Fire is going to be a reality if we have road safety issues like we have right now in northern Ontario.”
In an email to Newswatch, the Ministry of Transportation said it “continues to take critical steps to improve road safety across our province,” pointing to $600 million for building and repairing northern highways, roads and bridges. Of that amount, over $350 million is “to improve safety and reliability along Highways 11, 17 and the 11/17 corridor specifically,” Charlotte Carron, the senior communications advisor in Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria’s office said.
Many at the meeting, politicians and residents alike, spoke about the importance of applying sustained pressure, with some in the audience noting that multiple provincial governments have failed to adequately improve the Trans-Canada through the north over decades.
Some initiatives, like the work to four-lane stretches of Highway 11/17 near Thunder Bay, are ongoing, and Ford backed four-laning the Trans-Canada across northern Ontario when he was in Thunder Bay in July, 2025, although no firm commitments have surfaced in the Northwest since.
Recently, The Globe and Mail’s editorial board called for northern highway improvements. The Northwestern Ontario Municipal Association, and its sister organization in northeastern Ontario, has also repeatedly pressed for safer highways and have highlighted how those improvements fit into current senior governmental development priorities.
“I think we’ve seen that it’s really hard to hold people’s attention these days,” Stiles said. “It’s really important that we keep up the pressure, and I mean people here have been doing it for decades, so I don’t want to pretend like it’s something new — it’s not.”
“But it’s gotten so bad, and I think we really need to remember that it’s going to take a number of actions.”
That means working across party lines, Stiles said, adding that “we’re going to work with anybody that it takes to get this done,” including the provincial PCs and the federal Liberal Party.
“It’s not a partisan issue, it should not be treated as a partisan issue,” she said.
“Let’s look at it as an opportunity to do the right thing for the people of Ontario, to do the right thing for northern Ontario, and to do the right thing for our economy because I can tell you that their friends down on Bay Street in Toronto, they care a lot about that.”
