THUNDER BAY – “You can have all the critical minerals on the ground (that) you want, but if you’re moving transports and people up and down the highways that are not safe, that’s a major concern.”
That’s according to president of the Northern Ontario Municipal Association (NOMA), Rick Dumas, who said that one thing the didn”t see in Canada’s 2026 budget, released Thursday, is the highway corridor system they’ve been pushing for.
While NOMA pleased with their initial reading of it as there are some great opportunities for Northwestern Ontario to see some benefits from it, Dumas said the organization will continue to push for highway safety.
Dumas said a letter to Minister François-Philippe Champagne of National Revenue and to Prime Minister Mark Carney was drafted Friday “to see if we can have a discussion around that and what that might look like going forward.”
“We know that they worked with the Ontario government and released the news on the $1 billion contribution from the federal government, working with the provincial government for the Ring of Fire road, which is great, but to get to the Ring of Fire, you need to travel the northern highway system,” said Dumas.
He also referenced the movement of troops across Canada, an approach they took last year after the federal government committed 5 per cent of Canada’s GDP by 2035 to NATO, to help ensure security.
“How do we put the movement of our troops across Canada and the sovereignty of our country with the Nipigon River Bridge into the actual build of the five per cent commitment that they made to NATO?” Dumas said.
“It’s going to be a real struggle to spend those billions and billions and billions of dollars to meet that commitment to NATO. So why don’t we put those monies into our roadways, make them safer for all our transports and our commercial and our residential people travelling on those, as well as putting a lot of people to work,” he said.
Dumas added that thousands would have work from the highway corridor project over the next 10 years.
“So we’re really going to keep pushing on that forefront and hopefully we’ll get some traction.”
Dumas said that looking at the budget through a Northwestern Ontario lens, they can see that impacts regarding mining and forestry sectors will be beneficial to the region.
