OPINION: Twin Carefully, But Do Not Undervalue Canada’s Northern Lifeline

September 29, 2026

Northern Ontario needs a divided Kenora-to-Sudbury highway to save lives, protect trade and create jobs

Northern Policy Institute is right that 2+1 highways could save lives sooner and at a much lower cost. It is wrong, however, to let traffic volume become the main test for the future of a national trade corridor

THUNDER BAY – OPINION – If a serious collision closes Highway 11 or Highway 17 in Northern Ontario, the problem is not measured only by the number of vehicles waiting behind the barricade.

Food, fuel, mail, medicine, mine supplies, forestry products and other freight can be delayed. Workers can miss shifts. Patients can lose access to appointments. Tourists can be stranded.

Trucking companies may face extra driver time, fuel costs and border complications. In some locations, the nearest practical detour is extremely long.

In reality, there is no Canadian detour at all.

That is why the debate over twinning and 2+1 highways cannot be settled by a traffic count alone.

Northern Policy Institute’s new report, Twin Carefully: Why 2+1 is the Best Fit for Most Northern Ontario Highways, is serious, useful and worth reading.

Author William Dunstan makes a persuasive case that a divided 2+1 design could improve safety and passing opportunities far faster than waiting decades for a fully twinned highway.

But the report also risks defining Northern Ontario’s highways as ordinary low-volume rural roads. Dunstan doesn’t look at the national importance, the number of lives lost on those highways especially in the winter.

Highways 11 and 17 are more than simply highways.

They are parts of the Trans-Canada Highway and Canada’s National Highway System.

Their importance comes not only from how many vehicles use them, but from what those vehicles carry, who depends on them and what happens when the road fails.

What Northern Policy Institute Gets Right

A 2+1 highway has one lane in each direction and a third passing lane that alternates direction every few kilometres. A median barrier separates opposing traffic. The design has been used in Sweden, Germany and other countries.

The safety appeal is clear. A centre barrier can greatly reduce the risk of head-on collisions. Regular passing lanes can prevent long lines of frustrated motorists from building behind heavy trucks. In the North, where safe passing opportunities can be limited, those are important benefits.

The Institute also makes a powerful point about time. A perfect highway that takes 40 or 60 years to build does nothing for the family travelling tonight. If Ontario can install a proven barrier-separated design much sooner, governments should not delay that work while waiting for money to twin every kilometre.

The report estimates that converting 2,915 kilometres of Highways 11, 17 and 71 that currently have fewer than four lanes to a 2+1 design would cost about C$3.3 billion. It estimates that twinning the same distance would cost about C$18.8 billion. The author properly describes these as preliminary estimates.

The report recommends full twinning on four broad sections:

Highway 17 between Greater Sudbury and North Bay;
Highway 17 between Greater Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie;
Highway 11/17 between Thunder Bay and Nipigon; and
Highway 11/17 between Thunder Bay and Shabaqua Corners.

On most other sections, the Institute says 2+1 would deliver similar safety and traffic-flow benefits at a much lower cost.

That is a credible argument. It should change the discussion. It should not end it.

The Missing Test: What Does a Closure Cost Canada?

The report’s main decision rule is based on annual average daily traffic, or AADT. It points to evidence that 2+1 roads can work well with 15,000 vehicles per day and, in some international examples, even more.

Most northern sections are far below that level.

The Institute calculated a distance-weighted 2024 average of 3,251 vehicles per day between the Manitoba border and Shabaqua Corners, 1,998 between Nipigon and Wawa, and 2,422 between Wawa and Sault Ste. Marie.

Those numbers matter for congestion and capacity.

They do not fully measure national importance.

A truck hauling groceries, industrial equipment or critical supplies counts as one vehicle.

A car travelling a short local distance also counts as one vehicle. Their economic and social consequences are not the same if the highway closes.

The Institute’s own truck data show why this matters.

In 2019, trucks accounted for about 47 per cent of the reported traffic between the Manitoba border and Shabaqua Corners.

Trucks were roughly half of traffic from Nipigon to Beardmore and almost two-thirds between Beardmore and the Highway 663 junction. Those are unusually freight-heavy roads, even when the total vehicle count is modest.

The report also found truck traffic grew faster than overall traffic on several sections between 2014 and 2019. Examples included the Manitoba border to Shabaqua Corners, Nipigon to Wawa, Sault Ste. Marie to Greater Sudbury, and North Bay to the Nipissing District boundary.

There is an important limitation: the latest truck years available to the author were 2019 and 2021, and the report avoided relying on 2021 because pandemic conditions may have made that year unrepresentative. That means a long-range decision is being informed by truck-growth data that end before several newer trade, mining and supply-chain priorities emerged.

The Nipigon Bridge Was a National Warning

On January 10, 2016, a section of the newly opened Nipigon River Bridge lifted and the Trans-Canada Highway closed.

For about 17 hours, the only all-Canadian highway connection between eastern and western Canada was severed. One alternating lane reopened the next day, but delays and restrictions continued.

At the time, about 1,300 trucks crossed the bridge each day carrying an estimated C$100 million in goods.

Industry and government agencies had to arrange temporary rules so some domestic Canadian freight could detour through the United States. The Canadian Trucking Alliance reported delays averaging about one hour while trucks were individually escorted across the single open lane.

The C$100-million figure must be used carefully. It was the estimated value of freight moving through the corridor each day, not a claim that C$100 million disappeared from the economy every day. Most delayed goods still reached their destinations.

The real economic cost was a smaller, but still significant, combination of:

extra driver hours, fuel and vehicle operating costs;
missed delivery windows and production schedules;
inventory shortages and spoilage risks;
border paperwork and restrictions for domestic loads forced through the United States;
delayed mail, food, medicine and community supplies;
lost time for residents, emergency services and businesses; and
the wider risk created when a national corridor has a single point of failure.

No publicly available source reviewed for this article provides a complete audited dollar total for the Nipigon disruption. That absence is itself a policy problem. Ontario and Canada should be measuring the full cost of northern highway closures instead of treating them only as traffic incidents.

Ontario now says Highway 17 moves goods valued at more than C$18.6 billion each year. That equals an average freight flow of roughly C$51 million per day. Again, that daily figure is not the amount lost during a closure. It shows the scale of commerce placed at risk by an unreliable corridor.

A 2+1 Highway Is Safer, But Not Fully Redundant

A median-separated 2+1 highway can prevent many head-on collisions. That is a major advantage over the present two-lane design.

However, a typical 2+1 road still has only one operating lane in one direction for much of its length. A disabled transport, major collision, fire, rockfall, washout or bridge problem can still block that direction and may force a full closure while emergency crews work.

The cost estimate used by Northern Policy Institute assumes a 2+1 road would return to an ordinary two-lane layout at major water crossings to avoid replacing bridges. That choice lowers the estimated construction cost, but it can also preserve the exact chokepoints where reliability matters most.

A properly designed twinned highway is not closure-proof. Severe weather and major collisions can close divided highways too. But separate carriageways create more options. Traffic may continue on the unaffected side, or crossovers may allow controlled two-way traffic while responders use the other carriageway. That added resilience has value even where daily traffic is below a traditional congestion threshold.

International Evidence Must Be Tested in Northern Ontario

Swedish and German experience gives Ontario good reason to test 2+1 roads. It does not prove that every northern section will perform the same way.

Northern Ontario has long distances, rock cuts, severe winter conditions, heavy truck traffic, limited cell coverage, sparse emergency services and few alternate routes. Snow storage, plowing around median barriers, breakdown areas, wildlife collisions, emergency access and oversized loads all need local testing.

Ontario announced its first Highway 11 pilot north of North Bay in 2022. Construction on the southern section is expected to start in 2027, with the northern section following in 2029. In other words, Ontario does not yet have long-term operating evidence from its own 2+1 pilot.

The international evidence is promising. The Ontario evidence is not yet complete.

The Cost Comparison Is Useful, But Not a Final Budget

Northern Policy Institute deserves credit for showing the size of the possible savings. Still, its C$18.8-billion estimate for twinning every remaining kilometre should not be mistaken for an engineered project budget.

The report states that there is no standard Ontario or Canadian per-kilometre cost for twinning. It uses an average of about C$6 million per kilometre, based on publicly available examples. Actual costs change sharply with bridges, rock, drainage, property, utility relocation, environmental requirements and construction access.

A current example makes the point. Ontario has started a five-kilometre twinning project on Highway 11/17 between McGuire Road and Coughlin Road, including two new bridges over the Black Sturgeon River. The reported construction contract is C$87.9 million, or roughly C$17.6 million per kilometre. That figure should not be applied to the whole North because the project includes major bridge work. It does show why corridor planning requires section-by-section engineering rather than one average price.

The same caution applies to the 2+1 estimate. The lower figure depends partly on using the existing road platform and avoiding major bridge replacements. Those choices may be sound in some locations and inadequate in others.

The Trans-Canada Is National, Even Though Ontario Owns the Road

The Trans-Canada Highway was built through federal-provincial cost sharing under the Trans-Canada Highway Act. Today, provinces decide the design, construction, safety standards and financing of the highways under their jurisdiction. Ottawa can still provide funding, and Transport Canada recognizes the highway’s value to the national economy.

That division of responsibility must not become an excuse. Ontario operates the northern corridor, but Canada depends on it.

Southern Ontario would not accept a national trade route whose normal response to a fatal collision was an all-day shutdown with no practical detour. Northern residents should not be asked to accept that standard either.

The Better Answer Is a Phased National Corridor Plan

The choice should not be reduced to twinning every kilometre or building 2+1 everywhere.

A credible plan would use both designs, guided by safety, freight, emergency access and national resilience:

Build 2+1 sections quickly where they can prevent head-on collisions and where full twinning is not expected for decades. Northerners should not wait for safety improvements.
Twin the sections where a closure creates an unacceptable national or regional failure. That assessment should include truck share, dangerous grades and curves, winter exposure, bridge chokepoints, collision history, detour length, emergency access and the value of freight – not just total AADT.
Protect critical crossings. Bridges and culverts should be reviewed for single-point-of-failure risk, with parallel structures or practical contingency routes where justified.
Design for incident management. Wider shoulders, emergency pull-offs, median gates, crossovers, tow-truck staging, rest areas, communications coverage and rapid collision investigation can shorten closures on both 2+1 and twinned roads.
Create a federal-provincial funding agreement for the northern Trans-Canada. A route that serves national trade should not depend only on the population and tax base beside it.
Publish the cost of closures. Ontario should report closure duration, truck delays, detour distances, emergency impacts and estimated economic costs. Without those numbers, governments cannot compare the full value of resilience with the cost of construction.

NetNewsLedger View: Do Not Turn 2+1 Into a Permanent Ceiling

Northern Policy Institute has made an important contribution.

It is however opening the door to limit what is really needed long term.

Some Historical Perspective

In the 1950s, C. D. Howe argued that Alberta natural gas should reach eastern Canadian markets through an all-Canadian pipeline. Crossing the Canadian Shield through Northern Ontario was difficult and expensive, and private investors were reluctant to finance that section.

Ottawa nevertheless treated the route as a nation-building project and helped ensure that the pipeline remained on Canadian soil.

The decision was controversial, but it reflected a lasting principle: critical Canadian infrastructure must remain under Canadian control, even when the cheaper route appears to run through the United States.

Parks Canada recounts the 1956 pipeline debate here.

That principle applies directly to Highways 11 and 17 today. These roads are not simply regional routes serving a relatively small population.

They are parts of the Trans-Canada Highway, carrying people, food, fuel, industrial equipment and billions of dollars in goods across the country. Measuring their importance only through average daily traffic ignores their strategic role.

A national transportation corridor must be assessed by what happens when it fails, not only by how many vehicles use it on an ordinary day.

The 2016 Nipigon River Bridge failure demonstrated the danger. When the bridge closed, Canada’s main all-Canadian east-west highway connection was severed.

Some vehicles faced the prospect of travelling through the United States, where Canadian domestic freight became subject to American border rules and decisions. Current trade tensions provide a sharp warning that even Canada’s closest ally will act in its own economic and political interests. Canada cannot base the reliability of its national highway network on the assumption that American authorities will always permit easy emergency access.

The lesson from C. D. Howe is not that cost should be ignored. It is that national sovereignty, resilience and long-term security have value that does not appear in a simple construction estimate. Ontario should use 2+1 highways where they can deliver faster safety improvements, but Ottawa and Queen’s Park must continue twinning critical parts of Highways 11 and 17, remove single points of failure and create reliable Canadian detour capacity.

Just as the pipeline had to cross the Shield to keep Canadian energy moving through Canada, the Trans-Canada Highway must be strong enough to keep Canadians and Canadian goods moving without depending on permission from another country.

It is right to challenge the idea that four lanes are the only safe answer. It is right that a lower-cost 2+1 road can save lives sooner. It is right that every dollar spent on asphalt is a dollar that cannot be spent on health care, housing, remote airports or all-season roads.

But the counterargument is equally important: traffic volume is not the same as strategic value.

A national highway must be judged by what happens on an ordinary day and by what happens on its worst day. It must carry traffic safely, but it must also keep Canada connected when a truck crashes, a bridge fails or severe weather closes part of the route.

The danger is not that Ontario will build some 2+1 highways. The danger is that governments will use 2+1 as a permanent budget ceiling and declare the northern Trans-Canada finished.

Build the quick safety improvements. Twin the nationally critical and failure-prone sections. Remove the chokepoints. Create real detour and emergency capacity. Make Ottawa a full funding partner.

Northern Ontario does not need gold-plated highways. It does need a national highway that does not become Canada’s weakest link whenever one collision blocks the road.