SHIPPERS NAVIGATE TROUBLED WATERS
Warming makes risky conditions a flashpoint for tension in the Arctic
There’s a bit of a misconception that climate changes means warming, less ice, and it’s easier to navigate. In fact, it’s making navigation a little riskier or more complex.
This is the final part of Northern Exposure, a series that examines how a warming Arctic opens up the Northwest Passage and economic opportunities, but also creates headaches. It’s December in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, about 20 degrees below freezing on what is considered a warm day, and for the first winter ever Nicole Maksagak thought she would be driving in the comfort of a Ford F-150 pick-up truck.
Instead, she’s making at least eight runs per day on her Ski-Doo to take her four children, aged six to 13, to school, commute to work and run errands.
Maksagak said she might feel better on her snowmobile if she didn’t owe so much money on the 2018 Ford. Her truck, however, is stranded thousands of miles away in Inuvik — along with critical supplies ordered by businesses and the town of Cambridge Bay — after shipping traffic in the western Arctic unexpectedly stopped early this fall due to poor ice conditions.
“I’ve never seen my vehicle in person, I never even test drove it,” she said. “But I’m paying for it, and I paid for the insurance, plus the registration.”
Her situation shows why shipping is such a flashpoint for tension in Arctic communities since a failed arrival of just about anything has cascading consequences.
It also illustrates an overlooked aspect of climate change’s impact: Maritime traffic in the Arctic is higher than ever as mining and resource extraction projects increase along with other investments, but shipping conditions are more dangerous than ever as a result of the weather’s greater seasonal variation.
“There’s a bit of a misconception that climate change means warming, less ice, and it’s easier to navigate,” said Neil O’Rourke, assistant commissioner of the Canadian Coast Guard in the Arctic. “In fact, it’s making navigation a little riskier or more complex.”
O’Rourke points out that the start and end of each shipping season has become difficult to predict.
“For years, we could be certain that ice would be there or wouldn’t be there,” he said. “What we’re seeing more recently is we don’t know what kind of weather patterns and what kind of ice we’re going to get.”
A study released earlier this year found that Arctic ice is retreating around the globe, and that the average shipping route has shifted 290 kilometres north into areas that were previously unnavigable.
The study, conducted by Paul Berkman an oceanographer at Tufts University, and Greg Fiske of the Woods Hole Research Center, used radar data from marine vessels in the Arctic between 2009 and 2016. It also suggested that cruise ships and pleasure yachts are increasingly venturing into Arctic waters.
“We’ve been fairly fortunate that we haven’t seen a major searchand-rescue or environmental incident,” O’Rourke said.
This summer, he noted, two Argentinian men tried to sail an 11-metre yacht through Canada’s Arctic only to find themselves in danger in the Belloit Strait, which is in the same region (Kitikmeot) of Nunavut as Cambridge Bay. Their ship, trapped by ice, began sinking and they were forced to jump on a drifting ice floe until a helicopter could rescue them.
“Many of the smaller cruise ships that wanted to go through the Northwest Passage were blocked and had to be turned around,” said O’Rourke, who added that the lateseason blockage may actually have lowered maritime traffic in the Arctic this season.
Nonetheless, preliminary federal data shows the Arctic is indeed opening to more ships: The number of voyages through the federally monitored area reached an all-time high in 2018, up more than 400 per cent during the past three-and-a-half decades.
Bulk carriers, tankers, tug boats, cargo ships, fishing boats, cruise ships and even personal yachts all contributed to the rise in traffic, which has coincided with increased economic diversification in Nunavut. Mining, for example, now accounts for 21.5 per cent of the territory’s economy, up from less than four per cent a decade ago, according to the rating agency DBRS Ltd.
Arctic communities, such as Cambridge Bay, aren’t connected to electrical grids and lack roads connecting them to the rest of the country, so they depend on resupply shipments to function. Despite that need, they aren’t always given priority by shipping companies.
Indeed, customers in the western Arctic that had shipments scheduled earlier in this year received their orders without incident.
“The thing that pisses me off is the barge company brought a barge in for the mine,” Maksagak said, “but left the community supplies in Inuvik.”
Meanwhile, she and others in Cambridge Bay, and in two other western Arctic communities, Paulatuk and Kugluktuk, are stuck waiting on millions of dollars’ worth of cargo that won’t arrive until the ocean thaws again and shipping starts up many months from now.
Tracking what happened to the barges is something that Maksagak and others have taken pains to understand.
The shipping company, Marine Transportation Services, better known as MTS, was purchased by the Northwest Territories in 2016 when its predecessor, a privately held company, was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Its barges leave from Hay River, in the southern part of the Northwest Territories on Great Slave Lake, and follow the Mackenzie River to a spot near the border of Alaska before they enter the ocean and tack east towards Nunavut.
For people in Cambridge Bay, the only other option is to use a company in Quebec that ships from the east — something now under consideration by many even though it’s technically further away.
“Per pound, MTS was probably just a hair cheaper,” said Peter Laube, an owner of Kalvik Enterprises Inc., a construction company based in Cambridge Bay.
But his suppliers are located in Edmonton, so using MTS made the most logistical sense anyway.
Laube and others said MTS kept shifting the dates for when the barges would leave and arrive in Cambridge Bay until it was finally too late in the season to reliably navigate Arctic waters.
A spokesman for the N.W.T. infrastructure ministry declined to comment for this article.
The Canadian Coast has a fleet of 15 ice breakers it deploys to help escort ship traffic through the Arctic, and O’Rourke said they made their way through western waters earlier in the season.
But as the shipping season was ending, sometime around October, he said warmer temperatures caused a large chunk of multiyear ice — which is thicker and either difficult or impossible for icebreakers to penetrate — to drift south and block the normal shipping channel.
As a result, the community’s barge would not have made it past Amundsen Gulf (which is between Banks Island, Victoria Island and the mainland and about 620 kilometres west of Cambridge Bay), according to press releases issued in early October by the N.W.T. Infrastructure Minister Wally Schumann after deciding to cancel the shipments.
The press release described the ice conditions around Amundsen Gulf as “the most challenging in over 30 years, but the decision to cancel shipments predictably upset many in Cambridge Bay.
“Our argument was you’re saying it’s ice conditions, but ... like they serviced mining,” Laube said.
The problem, he and others said, is that the shipping company prioritized other orders, including taking barges up to Alaska, and waited so long to leave for Cambridge Bay that there was bound to be ice.
The poor ice conditions also affected mining companies, but not as severely as the communities.
There are two major mining companies operating in close proximity to Cambridge Bay: TMAC Resources Inc., which produces gold from a mine about 150 kilometres away from the town; and Sabina Gold and Silver Corp., which is still in pre-construction phase of a gold mine.
TMAC Resources said it received all its supplies this year through a Quebec-based shipping company. Sabina used multiple suppliers, including MTS, and missed at least one shipment.
Bruce McLeod, chief executive of Sabina, said his company had planned to test the suitability of its proposed mine site for wind power, but the tower and equipment needed to do so, along with diesel fuel and other cargo, were on a barge that was blocked in by ice.
“When you only have one way of getting your equipment in on a reasonable basis, it’s the bane of everyone in the north,” McLeod said.
Laube said he blames the shipping company for poor planning, not the mining companies for getting their goods first.
After cancelling shipments to the community, MTS announced it would charter planes to airlift essential supplies, which raised questions about what would be onboard.
Laube said the missed barge forced to him to pause several residential projects mid-build because he didn’t have roofing, flooring and other materials. His heart sank when the first shipment by air arrived.
He said some of the materials sent were fouled by a stench of mould so strong he couldn’t keep them indoors. Other material was not essential.
“They flew in screw jacks, like a big crate full of bolts, which are worthless until the rest of the building materials come in,” Laube said. “And there was like a bunch of frozen paint and frozen pop. We just said why are they flying all this in? It’s worthless.”
The situation escalated politically in October when members of the N.W.T. legislative assembly began to question Schumann, the infrastructure minister, about whether he had prioritized communities’ resupply shipments. Paulatuk, one of the communities that missed a shipment, is located in the N.W.T..
For northern communities, which are not connected to any grid, receiving diesel and other critical supplies for the year is a matter of survival.
The town of Cambridge Bay, for instance, was expecting additional trucks to service garbage as well as water and sewage for its roughly 2,000 residents.
Laube said the situation has meant the municipal workforce is working overtime to service every household.
On Oct. 31, the N.W.T. legislature scheduled a no-confidence vote to remove Schumann, who insisted he stood by all his decisions. He kept his position by a 12-6 vote.
In Cambridge Bay, business owners such as Laube are wondering what’s next. He said he and others still have not received any refund from MTS or suppliers, and face mounting losses as residential building projects remain stalled.
Making matters worse is that the small community has been growing, in part due to the recent addition of the Canadian High Arctic Research Station, a base for scientists that is still under construction.
In 2014, the community also missed its barge shipment when MTS was still a privately operated company. In that case, MTS built an ice road to deliver supplies at great expense to the community, but it has no plans to do something similar.
Instead, the town is stuck without its orders until the ocean thaws. Laube said it all could have been avoided if MTS had departed earlier in the season, or, barring that, leased a larger plane to deliver essential supplies.
“The thing is, if a private company (failed to deliver), you know how fast the company would be in court?” he asked.
MTS may still find itself in court, too: Laube said he and other business owners have retained a lawyer and are considering whether to file a lawsuit.