NIPIGON — Prolonged and frequent closures of the Trans-Canada are causing a number of issues in communities the highway bisects.
That’s according to Nipigon Mayor Suzanne Kukko and Greenstone’s Jamie McPherson — both municipalities the highway runs right through.
“This has certainly been one for the ages,” McPherson told Newswatch of the number of times Highway 11 closures have impacted his community this winter. “There’s a combination of the snow — everybody knows how much snow we’ve got — so how many times the roads have been closed due to snow.”
“Then we have the significant increase of traffic over the last few decades, so there’s more people on the road.”
That, he said, is contributing to more serious accidents.
To the south and west, where Highways 11 and 17 meet in Nipigon, Kukko said closures of either highway have immediate impacts in her township. Those, she said, include disruption of school bus service, not only between Nipigon and nearby Red Rock, but also for student transportation from communities along Highway 11, like Lake Helen and Biinjitiwaabik Zaaging (formerly Rocky Bay).
People who have to travel between communities for work were also stuck during recent shutdowns, she said.
Earlier in the week, sections of the Trans-Canada were closed for well over 12 hours, including stretches that impacted Nipigon, Greenstone and others. An Ontario 511 camera at the Nipigon River Bridge around 6:30 p.m. on Feb. 24 showed an extremely long line of vehicles stuck due to the closure.
Kukko said that traffic jam extended well along the highway in the municipality itself.
“The other thing is, once it opens after that many hours, there’s a massive, massive traffic jam of trucks,” she said. “What happened (was), we had a council meeting on Tuesday night and two of our council members that live off the highway weren’t able to come in because of that traffic jam.”
“They couldn’t get out of their driveways.”
While Ontario 511 wasn’t showing any highway closures as of early Friday afternoon, Environment Canada had warnings, advisories and special weather statements across all of the Northwest cautioning about expected high winds and the potential for snow squalls and blowing snow that would reduce visibility on the highways.
The agency suggested postponing non-essential travel in Greenstone and along Highway 11 as “travel will likely be hazardous due to near-zero visibility.”
Both Kukko and McPherson said the closures and resulting traffic jams impact the ability of emergency services to get to where they need to go, and the ability for people to travel to Thunder Bay for things like medical appointments.
“You’ve got to go a day early,” McPherson said.
Greenstone is an amalgamated municipality made up of several individual communities kilometres apart.
“The impact in town when the roads are closed or you can’t get between communities, then you have all the trucks parked in town, especially in the Longlac ward,” he continued. “In the Beardmore ward (during Tuesday’s closure), I’m sure, with the road closure there … the highway was packed.”
“If you want to go across town in Beardmore, probably not easy.”
Both mayors said their communities continue to lobby through regional organizations like the Northwestern Ontario Municipal Association. Improving the Trans-Canada Highway through Northwestern Ontario has been a long-standing priority for the organization.
“There’s no place to pass on Highway 11,” McPherson said. “Within all of Greenstone, there’s only one passing lane, and we’re 180 kilometres long.”
Communities in the Northwest “have been asking for the province to take a number of steps — and I think, some of those steps, if taken, would combat what we’ve seen this winter,” Kukko said.
“This is an unusually difficult winter, but it does happen and there were deaths last year, there were closures last year,” she said. “It’s just one of these things that it’s not going to get solved unless there’s some action — significant action — taken.”
McPherson pointed to ongoing lobbying efforts to widen highways with, at least, a two-plus-one lane system (“we know four-laning is not in the cards in the near future,” he said of Highway 11), and Kukko backed calls by the provincial NDP to bring things like highway maintenance and the training and testing of commercial truck drivers back into the public sector.
Kukko had co-sponsored a New Democrat MPP’s private member’s bill that attempted to address highway safety along northern Ontario stretches of Highways 11 and 17.
It was defeated by the majority-Progressive Conservative legislature in late 2025.
“It’s complicated, but there’s something (that) has got to be done,” Kukko said.
“This is crazy.”
