Ottawa catches up to Modern Treaty Nations on the Mackenzie Valley Highway and Grays Bay

On June 24, 2026, federal ministers in Yellowknife announced that the Mackenzie Valley Highway and the Grays Bay Road and Port would be the first projects formally advanced for designation as projects of national interest under the Building Canada Act. Construction on the highway could start as early as 2028, with Grays Bay following in 2029.

Both projects had been stalled for decades between federal commitments. The Mackenzie Valley Highway construction halted south of Wrigley in 1977 and finished the last 18 km only in 1994. Federal Phase 1 environmental assessment funding for the section north of Wrigley did not land until 2018. Ottawa rejected the joint KIA and Government of Nunavut Grays Bay funding request the same year, leaving that project dormant until 2024. The Nations kept the work going through every one of those gaps.

On June 5, 2026, the Sahtu Secretariat Incorporated, the Gwich’in Tribal Council, and Pehdzéh Kı̨ First Nation signed a Memorandum of Understanding formalizing how they would work together on the planning and direction of the highway. Three governments, two of them Modern Treaty Nations, set the governance for a corridor that crosses all three territories. SSI has its own bilateral MOU with the Government of the Northwest Territories on the same file, most recently amended in 2024. The Sahtu Land and Water Board is processing applications. The Mackenzie Valley Environmental Impact Review Board has been engaged on the alignment for over a decade. The Gwich’in side is ready for the Phase 2 extension to Inuvik when it comes.

Grays Bay is a similar story. The Kitikmeot has been pushing for an overland route to a deepwater Arctic port for thirty years, starting as the Bathurst Inlet Port and Road Project in the late 1990s. The proponent now is West Kitikmeot Resources Corporation, whose major shareholder is the Kitikmeot Inuit Association. The Inuit organization at the centre of the project is also the rights-holder for the territory it crosses. The Nunavut Impact Review Board and the regulatory institutions built under the Nunavut Agreement are the regime the project moves through. KIA has spent years organizing the Kitikmeot region around the road and port, on Inuit terms.

The federal designation catches up to what the Modern Treaty Nations along these routes have been building for a generation.

Canada is starting to act like the treaty partner it agreed to be

Modern Treaties are nation-to-nation agreements that commit Canada to partnership in the future of the regions they cover. The Sahtu Dene and Métis Comprehensive Land Claim Agreement (1993) and the Gwich’in Comprehensive Land Claim Agreement (1992) settled title, transferred lands and capital, recognized harvesting rights, and built the co-management regime that governs the Mackenzie Valley today. The Nunavut Agreement (1993) did the same work for the Kitikmeot and the rest of what is now the territory of Nunavut. The Inuit, Sahtu Dene and Métis, and Gwich’in each surrendered Aboriginal title in exchange for, among other things, a permanent seat at the table on how projects move forward on their territory.

For most of the time since, the partnership those Treaties promised has been honoured unevenly. The Land Claims Agreements Coalition has been asking for an independent Commissioner for Modern Treaty Implementation since 2003. Nunavut Tunngavik sued Canada in 2006 for breach of the Nunavut Agreement and settled out of court in 2015 for $255 million, after the Nunavut Court of Justice ruled that Canada had failed to implement the General Monitoring Plan required by Article 12. Article 23 of the same Agreement, the federal commitment that Nunavut’s public service should reflect Nunavut’s Inuit majority, has not been met in any year since 1999. The 2003 Auditor General report on the Gwich’in and Nunavut files found federal practice was not letting the agreements meet their objectives, with the funding of the Gwich’in Tribal Council named as one of four illustrative disputes. Gwich’in self-government, contemplated by Chapter 5 of the Gwich’in Agreement in 1992, is still without a final agreement in force more than thirty years later.

Bill C-10, the legislation that would finally establish that Commissioner, remains held up at third reading in the House this spring after twenty years of effort by Modern Treaty leaders to get a basic accountability mechanism in place for what Canada committed to in writing. The Commissioner question was still unresolved when federal ministers landed in Yellowknife on June 24. Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson said the federal government would “build, in partnership with Indigenous Peoples, respecting rights and treaties.” Officials told reporters Ottawa would not interfere with the North’s environmental and project development regime, citing it as fundamental to the Modern Treaties Canada signed beginning in the 1970s. The federal use of Building Canada Act powers would only follow the completion of territorial assessments, at which point federal permits would be approved “forthwith.”

That is the right approach. The reforms work in the Mackenzie Valley and the Kitikmeot when they operate in support of the MVRMA and Nunavut Agreement regimes, not over top of them.

Putting the respect on the legislative record

Hodgson’s words at the June 24 announcement were about partnership. The action that came with them, listing the first two projects of national interest while the broader One Canadian Economy engagement is still open, will test the partnership. The engagement is the federal consultation on the next legislation in the major projects package, covering how major projects advance and how Modern Treaty Nations participate. It was scheduled to close on June 7 and has been extended to July 22, 2026.  What goes into the statute outlives the minister who wrote it, the cabinet that signed off, and the governments that come after.

Start with a statutory carve-out. The federal commitments made on June 24, and the Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister’s commitment to Parliament that Modern Treaties and self-government agreements will be fully honoured, are stronger when they sit in a statutory clause than in a preamble or a ministerial speech. A “subject to the relevant Modern Treaty, related implementation legislation, and any related self-government agreement” clause, written into the legislation that comes out of the One Canadian Economy consultations, would carry the commitment forward. The Sahtu Dene and Métis Comprehensive Land Claim Agreement, the Gwich’in Comprehensive Land Claim Agreement, the Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act, and the Nunavut Agreement are the ones that govern the current announcement. Future governments would inherit the carve-out, not just the speech.

Then resource the institutions doing the work. The MVEIRB hearing schedule, the SLWB and GLWB application reviews, the NIRB review track on Grays Bay, and the implementation capacity inside SSI, GTC, Pehdzéh Kı̨, and KIA all need to land ahead of the federal project clock, not at the close of a comment period. The Treaty co-management bodies are the ones holding the substantive review timelines. They have to be funded to hold them.

And leave room for an off-ramp. Modern Treaty regimes contemplate that new information can change an assessment. Cumulative effects can exceed what was originally assumed. Knowledge held by the Modern Treaty Nation can surface impacts no federal review would have seen. A fast-tracked process should preserve the ability of the Modern Treaty Nation, with the relevant co-management board, to pull a specific activity or component back out for project-level review if any of those conditions emerge. A national interest designation that cannot accommodate new information will not hold over the life of the projects it covers.

The Inuvialuit Final Agreement, the Tłı̨chǫ Agreement, and the Yukon Umbrella Final Agreement all built co-management regimes the federal government can lean on the same way. The Mackenzie Valley and the Kitikmeot are just the first two places the major-projects reforms get to prove the principle.

What comes next

The Mackenzie Valley Highway has been on the federal books since 1958, when Diefenbaker’s Roads to Resources program named an all-season corridor up the Mackenzie to the Arctic coast as a national priority. Through every iteration since, the constant has been the Nations whose territory the corridor crosses pushing for it to move.

The Mackenzie Valley Highway will move into construction. Grays Bay will follow. On these files at least, Canada is saying it intends to operate the way the Treaties were always meant to be operated, with Modern Treaty Nations leading on their own territory and the Crown matching that leadership and using its own tools to clear the federal path.

The package coming out of the One Canadian Economy consultations is where the partnership gets fixed in law or left to the next minister's discretion. A bill that names the Modern Treaties and the implementation statutes, funds the co-management bodies on the schedule the projects actually run on, and preserves the Modern Treaty Nation's ability to pull a component back for project-level review will carry the June 24 commitments into the years after this cabinet. A bill that does not will leave these projects exposed to the next federal turn, the way every prior generation of these projects was left exposed.

The Nations have done this work for decades. The question now is whether the Crown writes that work into the statute, or leaves it in the speech.