Nanisivik shuttered. Ekati bankrupt. With $35 billion on the line, Canada can’t afford to keep building without listening to Northerners.

The Carney government is shuttering the Nanisivik Naval Facility on northern Baffin Island, two government sources told the Globe and Mail this week. First announced by Stephen Harper in 2007 as a deep-water Arctic port that would project Canadian sovereignty into the Northwest Passage, Nanisivik never began operations. The original $258-million plan was downsized in 2012 to a summer-only refuelling station. Construction finished. Microbial corrosion in the jetty kept it from opening. Nineteen years and roughly $115 million later, the file is being closed.

There’s one version of this story where Nanisivik failed because the Arctic is harsh and unforgiving. The road washed out; the jetty corroded; COVID delayed construction; a contractor went into receivership. All of that is true. But none of it explains why a project announced in 2007 to anchor Canadian Arctic sovereignty was scaled down to a four-week-a-year fuel stop before it ever opened, while Nunavut Premier P.J. Akeeagok spent years saying publicly that the project would never deliver enough for the territory and that Canada should be investing in projects that meet community needs and create economic development at the same time.

Nanisivik failed because it was designed for the North without being designed with Northerners. It was a Southern project parachuted onto a Northern site. That site happened to sit in Nunavut, where Inuit hold constitutionally protected ownership and governance authority through the Nunavut Agreement, the largest comprehensive land claim in Canadian history.

The Carney government has committed nearly $35 billion to upgrade military installations and Arctic infrastructure. Roads, ports, radar systems, fibre links, energy infrastructure, and forward operating locations are all on the table. Almost every dollar of that work will land on Modern Treaty land. If Canada wants to avoid another Nanisivik, it needs to build with Northerners.

The Arctic runs on Modern Treaty governance

Most of the Arctic is under the ownership or control of Modern Treaty Nations. This is not a rhetorical figure. The Inuvialuit Final Agreement, the Gwich’in Comprehensive Land Claim Agreement, the Sahtu Dene and Métis Comprehensive Land Claim Agreement, the Tłı̨chǫ Agreement, the Nunavut Agreement, the Labrador Inuit Land Claims Agreement, the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, and the Nunavik Inuit Land Claims Agreement. Yukon’s eleven self-governing First Nations operating under the Umbrella Final Agreement framework. 

 Modern Treaty Nations hold defined ownership and management of lands, resource rights, and law-making powers across roughly 80 percent of Canada’s Arctic. If the Crown wants to build in the Arctic, it builds on Modern Treaty land. There is no version of Canada’s Arctic strategy that goes around that fact.

But this also has the potential to be the power of this new Arctic strategy. Modern Treaty Nations have exactly the tools Canada needs to build at the speed it wants: defined decision-makers, settled land ownership, permanent co-management boards, regional planning bodies, and regulatory pathways that are public, durable, and on the record. The Nunavut Impact Review Board, the Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board, the Inuvialuit Joint Secretariat, and the Gwich’in Land Use Planning Board are established institutions with real legal authority.

Nanisivik is the most recent failure of this kind, but the pattern goes back decades – sometimes even on the same site! In fact, the 2007 Nanisivik naval facility was built on the site of a 1970s lead-zinc mine that had its own promise to deliver benefits to the people of Arctic Bay. That promise did not survive the closure of the mine in 2002. The townsite was demolished, and skilled workers were left without local employment. The community absorbed the costs of an industrial enterprise designed elsewhere, on terms it had limited ability to shape. When the federal government showed up two decades later to use the same site for a naval facility, the question of whether this was a project the community needed, or could lead, was not answered. And here we sit with history repeating.

The DEW Line is the older, starker version of the same lesson. Conceived in Washington and built across the Canadian Arctic in the mid-1950s, the network of 42 radar stations on Canadian territory was planned and largely funded by the United States, with Canada's role limited to granting access. Inuit communities were not consulted, were pulled into fixed settlements around the stations, and traditional land use and harvesting patterns were disrupted without any formal process to consider Inuit rights. When the stations were decommissioned, they left behind soil and groundwater contaminated with PCBs, petroleum hydrocarbons, and heavy metals across 21 sites. The cleanup took 15 years and cost Canadian taxpayers $575 million. Canada is now proposing to upgrade Arctic defence infrastructure across the same territory, with the same logic, and still no answer to the same question: who is this for? 

The $35 billion has the same flaw, on a bigger scale

Canada is making the same mistake on a much larger budget, with the risk that much of the value will not flow to Canadians.

The Arctic Economic and Security Corridor is the centrepiece project of Canada's Arctic investment program. It pairs a 230-kilometre all-season road through the Northwest Territories with the Grays Bay Road and Port on the Northwest Passage in Nunavut. Both governments and the Major Projects Office are treating it as nation-building infrastructure. The corridor is also one of the few projects in this program actually led by Northerners, and that part of the story is worth telling (more on that below).

But as CBC reported this week, the mineral deposits the corridor would actually unlock are not Canadian-owned. The Izok Lake and High Lake zinc-copper deposits belong to MMG Ltd., an Australia-headquartered base metals producer whose 72 per cent shareholder is China Minmetals Corporation, one of China’s largest state-owned enterprises. The Hackett River silver-zinc deposit belongs to Glencore, the Swiss mining and trading giant. Three of the marquee deposits the road and port exist to serve are owned offshore.

That is not, in itself, a reason not to build the corridor. Mineral development everywhere relies on a mix of capital sources, and Modern Treaty Nations are perfectly capable of negotiating with foreign-owned proponents on their own lands. The problem is what happens when the public infrastructure runs ahead of the Treaty-Nation governance and ownership work that should anchor it. Public dollars build a road and port. The mines that road and port were designed to serve are owned in Beijing and Baar. The Inuit organization on whose territory the whole thing sits is a shareholder in the road company, not in the deposits. Federal policy already requires national security review of foreign investment in critical mineral assets, and Ottawa has used that authority before, including to block the 2020 Chinese state-owned takeover of the Hope Bay gold project elsewhere in Nunavut. The screening tool exists. What is missing is a Crown strategy that uses public Arctic infrastructure to expand Modern Treaty Nation ownership of the underlying assets, not just connectivity to them.

This isn’t a hypothesis, unfortunately it is materializing right now at the Ekati diamond mine in the NWT. Ekati is owned by Burgundy Diamond Mines, an Australian-listed company whose Calgary-based subsidiary filed for creditor protection on May 2with more than $655 million in liabilities. According to the court filings, Burgundy is roughly $100 million short on reclamation security, owes more than $60 million to contractors, and is more than $8 million in arrears on impact benefit agreement payments to its four IBA partners: the Tłı̨chǫ Government, Akaitcho Treaty 8 (Yellowknives Dene First Nation and Łutsel K’e Dene First Nation), the North Slave Métis Alliance, and the Hamlet of Kugluktuk together with the Kitikmeot Inuit Association. The federal government had already extended a $175-million Crown corporation loan to keep the mine running. The mine ran for a few more months, but the IBA payments did not.

The Ekati workforce, by Burgundy’s own count, was about 30 percent Northern at the end of 2025. The reclamation gap, if Burgundy walks away, becomes public liability. The Indigenous governments holding the IBAs are unsecured creditors in a CCAA process running out of a courtroom in British Columbia. And while Burgundy was still solvent, it was already lobbying the GNWT to grandfather Ekati’s existing IBAs out of the territory’s incoming Mineral Resources Act, on the grounds that being asked to renegotiate could “further [erode] Ekati’s financial viability.” The new Act is the GNWT’s effort to require mining companies to pay more to Indigenous governments affected by their operations. Burgundy’s position, in writing, was that Ekati could not afford that. Six months later, Burgundy could not afford to make the payments under the agreements it already had.

This is a pattern that keeps happening in the North. The Eagle Gold Mine heap leach failure on June 24, 2024 released cyanide into the Dublin Gulch valley and the South McQuesten River, on the traditional territory of the First Nation of Na-cho Nyäk Dun. Victoria Gold went bankrupt. The Yukon government loaned up to $220 million to the receiver. Na-cho Nyäk Dun was not consulted on the sale process now underway, and cyanide-contaminated water is still spilling from the site as of this spring's snowmelt. In Yellowknife, 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide sit in underground chambers below the old Giant Mine, on Yellowknives Dene land. The federal cleanup is now projected to cost more than $4 billion. Northerners did not choose that liability. 

Defence Minister Bill Blair eventually said the lesson of Nanisivik was that defence investments need to “benefit people and communities as well as the Armed Forces.” Canada has heard it before, from Nanisivik, from the DEW Line, from every mine site that left a contaminated hole and unpaid promises behind. It has not acted like it.

If the Crown’s pitch for its Arctic program is sovereignty, the question is whose sovereignty it actually advances. The Modern Treaty Nation that holds constitutional ownership of the lands, or the foreign-listed proponents who hold the mineral claims down the road that Canadian taxpayers will fund? 

What building with Northerners actually looks like

Modern Treaty Nations are not stakeholders to be managed. They are the strongest partners Ottawa can have in the North: governments with constitutional ownership of the land, real decision-making authority, and a growing track record as proponents and equity holders in major projects.

Selkirk First Nation took ownership and operational control of the Minto Mine in 2025, the first time in Canadian history a First Nation has held full legal ownership of an established mine. The Sahtu Secretariat, Gwich'in Tribal Council, and Pehdzéh Kı̨ First Nation signed a joint MOU to advance the Mackenzie Valley Highway together. The Kitikmeot Inuit Association became the largest shareholder in West Kitikmeot Resources Corp., the proponent advancing the Grays Bay Road and Port, with the Tłı̨chǫ Government and Yellowknives Dene First Nation jointly leading the NWT side of the same corridor. The Tłı̨chǫ Government is conducting mineral surveys on its own lands to build its own resource data, with federal funding and a partnership with Fortescue to assess lithium potential. And the Tłı̨chǫ Government and Fortune Minerals are forming a joint venture to apply for federal funding to build the spur road connecting the Nico mine to Tłı̨chǫ Highway, infrastructure the Tłı̨chǫ would co-own, on their own territory, serving a project Grand Chief Jackson Lafferty called "an important first step toward meaningful Tłı̨chǫ participation in this and other critical minerals projects." 

These are Modern Treaty Nations working as governments and proponents, with the Crown as a partner rather than a planner. This is what Arctic sovereignty looks like when it belongs to its people.