Manitoba considers building 2nd port on Hudson Bay, sidelining Port of Churchill
CBC
Manitoba is exploring the idea of building a second deepwater port on Hudson Bay as part of a plan to ship potash from Saskatchewan and petroleum products from Alberta through the Arctic Ocean.
The NeeStaNan project, which could also involve a rail line or pipeline to carry bitumen or natural gas, would relegate the existing deepwater facility at the Port of Churchill to a regional supply hub, Manitoba Transportation and Infrastructure Minister Doyle Piwniuk said Friday in an interview.
Environmental groups are already sounding the alarm about the project due to concerns the southwestern coast of Hudson Bay is too remote for cleanup crews to remediate oil spills and too ecologically fragile to sustain more industrial activity.
The provincial support for the shipping corridor and port proposal also has the federal government stressing the strategic importance of the Port of Churchill, the recipient of almost $300 million worth of federal and provincial investment in recent years.
NeeStaNan's backers, however, said the transhipment of commodities through Hudson Bay could bolster exports from all three Prairie provinces and provide an economic development windfall for Indigenous communities located along the shipping route.
"The port and corridor will be 100 per cent Indigenous owned," said Robyn Lore, a NeeStaNan director based in Calgary.
Lore, an entrepreneur with a background in energy and agriculture, said his company NeeStaNan Projects Inc. is set up to determine the feasibility of the project.
On Thursday, Manitoba announced it will contribute $6.7 million to study the NeeStaNan's feasibility, provided Alberta and Saskatchewan cover the remainder of the $26-million study cost.
Piwniuk said NeeStaNan would complement the Port of Churchill but largely consign it to serving as a regional as opposed to international port.
"We got a lot of supplies that go up to the north to Churchill. That can still be a distribution centre," Piwniuk said Friday in a telephone interview from Medicine Hat, Alta.
"This is an opportunity to look at other natural resources that can come to Hudson Bay. And this is what feasibility study is going to be … where [is] the best place to locate this possible port?"
Right now, NeeStaNan intends to place the port along the Nelson River, hundreds of kilometres southeast of Churchill, effectively resurrecting a century-old abandoned megaproject called Port Nelson.
From 1912 to 1918, the federal government attempted to build a deepwater port along the north side of the Nelson River but was thwarted by labour shortages during the First World War, the extreme climate on the coast of Hudson Bay and heavy silting along the fast-flowing river.
The Hudson Bay Railway was originally intended to terminate at Port Nelson but was later diverted north instead to the mouth of the Churchill River, where the Port of Churchill was completed in 1931.
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