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

Thunder Bay – EDITORIAL – Northern Ontario does not need another reminder that its highways are lifelines. It just got one. The fatal March 7 crash near Smooth Rock Falls closed Highway 11 for almost 19 hours and renewed pressure from the Northwestern Ontario Municipal Association for faster action on highway safety.

For Thunder Bay and Northwestern Ontario, that is not an abstract policy debate. It is about whether families, truckers, patients and businesses can move at all when one crash blocks the road.

This is also an issue of nationhood. Whenever Highway 11/17 is closed, Canada is cut in half. We face an unfriendly political neighbour to the south.

The situation with the Trans-Canada Highway is not unlike the building of the Trans-Continental Railway, a decision deemed “The National Dream”.

Today that same impetus should push Prime Minister Mark Carney in that building mode.

In the north, the other missing piece in the puzzle is the proposed truck transport of Nuclear Waste to Ignace.

The safer path forward is no longer a mystery

Ontario already has the studies, the pilot projects and the municipal consensus it needs. The Northern Ontario Transportation Task Force called for more passing opportunities, new widening projects and an expansion of the 2+1 highway pilot, while Ontario’s 2024 budget said design and environmental work was proceeding on the first 2+1 project on Highway 11 north of North Bay.

This is no longer a question of what to do. It is a question of whether Queen’s Park and Ottawa are prepared to treat the Trans-Canada through the North as essential national infrastructure.

A divided highway is about more than speed

The strongest case for a divided corridor from Kenora to Sudbury is not convenience. It is resilience. On the Thunder Bay-Nipigon section, the Ministry of Transportation’s own project materials say there is no alternative continuous roadway for roughly 100 kilometres and that four-laning would provide a parallel, continuous route in the event of a collision, natural disaster or structural loss, while protecting the regional economy from closures. That is the logic Northern Ontario needs to apply much more broadly: when the road is divided, and when emergency crossovers are built in, one crash does not automatically have to close both directions for half a day.

Every day, about 8,400 truck trips move more than 87,000 tonnes of cargo worth over $200 million across the northern provincial highway network, according to Ontario’s transportation plan. FONOM has argued the corridor is already carrying the burden of a national east-west route while much of it remains two lanes and that truck traffic is expected to grow. For Thunder Bay, Kenora, Dryden, Sault Ste. Marie and Sudbury, the cost of a closure is measured not only in inconvenience, but in broken supply chains, delayed industrial shipments, postponed medical travel and lost economic confidence.

The job creation case is not theoretical

Northern highway work already creates jobs when governments choose to fund it. A 2022 contract to widen 14.4 kilometres of Highway 11/17 east of Highway 587 was valued at $107 million and was expected to create or sustain about 750 direct or indirect construction jobs. Ontario’s own Northern Ontario Transportation Plan said a single year of $625 million in northern highway and bridge work was estimated to create or sustain about 4,370 direct and indirect jobs.

A Kenora-to-Sudbury build would therefore mean years of work for equipment operators, bridge crews, surveyors, truckers, aggregate suppliers, engineers, environmental monitors and local service firms — and, done properly, major procurement and partnership opportunities for Indigenous businesses and communities along the route.

That last point is an inference from the scale and type of work involved, but the precedent for job creation is already clear in Ontario’s own numbers.

The cost will be large, but the province can no longer hide behind that fact

The Kenora-to-Sudbury drive is roughly 1,474 kilometres by road. Using Northern Policy Institute’s rough estimate of about $3 million per kilometre for highway twinning, a corridor-wide build from scratch would start at roughly $4.4 billion.

Recent northwestern Ontario contracts suggest real-world costs on shield terrain can run much higher: the Ouimet-Dorion widening cost $74.8 million for 8.6 kilometres, while the Highway 587-to-Pearl section cost $107 million for 14.4 kilometres. By simple arithmetic, that works out to roughly $7.4 million to $8.7 million per kilometre, which would push a gross, from-scratch Kenora-to-Sudbury build into the low-teens billions.

The real bill for the unfinished corridor would be lower than that because Ontario is already widening more than 100 kilometres between Thunder Bay and Nipigon and has a 40-kilometre Kenora-Manitoba widening project underway, with the first 6.5 kilometres completed in 2024. Still, even a phased build is plainly a multibillion-dollar nation-building project.

That number should not end the conversation; it should sharpen it. Ontario’s 2025 budget committed $27.4 billion over 10 years for the provincial highways program. Spread over 10 to 15 years and cost-shared with Ottawa — as the province and federal government have already done on recent Highway 11/17 projects — a divided Kenora-to-Sudbury corridor is expensive, but not impossible.

In fiscal terms, it is a choice, not a fantasy.

The build should be phased, but the destination must be clear

The smartest approach is not to wait for one perfect megaproject. It is to commit to one clear end state: a divided northern Trans-Canada that can stay open, move freight and separate opposing traffic.

That means accelerating the Kenora-border widening, finishing the Thunder Bay-Nipigon corridor, advancing the long-planned divided route west of Thunder Bay toward Shabaqua, and moving east with a mix of full twinning and median-barrier 2+1 design where volumes and terrain make that the best near-term option.

The Northern Policy Institute has argued that 2+1 roads with barriers can reduce head-on collisions and closures at lower cost, while Ontario’s task force recommended expanding the 2+1 pilot.

The mistake would be to use 2+1 as an excuse to delay the larger divided network rather than as a tool to build it faster.

What Northern Ontario should demand now

Municipal leaders have already done their part. NOMA and FONOM have kept highway safety and modernization on the agenda, and Ontario’s own reports acknowledge both the economic value of the corridor and the safety logic of widening it.

The next step is political: Queen’s Park should publish a Kenora-to-Sudbury divided-highway schedule with phasing, costs and annual targets, and Ottawa should come to the table as a funding partner because this is the Trans-Canada, not just a regional road.

Kenora to Sudbury should be the priority first stage of a wider divided corridor across Northern Ontario.

Northern residents should not have to wait for the next fatal crash or the next 18-hour closure to be told again that these highways are lifelines. We already know that.

The only serious question left is whether governments are prepared to build like they believe it.