OTTAWA — Clean electricity was the cornerstone of the last federal budget, but for Kono Tattuinee, the Liberal government’s support came up more than half a billion dollars short.

Nukik Corp., an Inuit-led company on whose board Tattuinee sits, has been seeking federal money for a project to supply reliable, clean electricity and fast internet—basic services for modern life—to just part of the North.

In Tattuinee’s home community of Rankin Inlet, the electricity comes from diesel, as it does throughout Nunavut.

“Our region has one of the highest carbon intensities in all of North America,” Tattuinee said in an interview with The Logic. “Every year, millions of litres of diesel are being shipped by boat to communities and industry in our territory. … The diesel generators run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. There’s no stops.”

Their exhaust stacks emit tonnes of greenhouse gas and pollute the land and the water, he said.

Furthermore, as is also the case across the North, internet and phone systems are hostage to weather, bad and good. The services run through satellites, whose beams can be taken out by storms and the sun’s rays alike.

“We were travelling from Rankin to Winnipeg a few days ago, and the internet was down,” Tattuinee said. “They had to use the old-school system, writing everything down, and that was our boarding pass to Winnipeg.”

You can’t reliably have a video meeting or sometimes even just log into a computer system, said Tattuinee, the president of the Kivalliq Inuit Association, which represents Inuit in the region of Nunavut just north of Manitoba.

At about 434,000 square kilometres, Kivalliq is two-thirds the size of Alberta. Its population is so low in proportion to its area that Statistics Canada rounds its density to zero, though about 11,000 people live there.

Slow, unreliable, expensive connectivity hurts everything from business to health care, education to culture. You can’t even take virtual classes or have a video medical consultation over a connection that works at dial-up speeds at best. Nunavut Arctic College has facilities in Rankin Inlet and some joint programs with universities, but in general the people have to leave to seek advanced education, and getting them back can be difficult, he said.

“It’s hard to attract the professionals that come and work up in the North because the amenities are not quite what you get anywhere down south,” Tattuinee said. 

Nukik’s solution: a 1,200-kilometre-long set of electricity and fibre-optic telecom lines starting in Gillam, the heartland for Manitoba’s hydroelectric dams along the Nelson River.

The Kivalliq proposal is one of several efforts to hardwire parts of the northern territories to the southern internet. CanArctic Inuit Networks wants to lay cable from Iqaluit to Happy Valley-Goose Bay in Labrador. Another line, originating in Alaska, could eventually connect to Tuktoyaktuk and Inuvik in the Northwest Territories.

The Kivalliq Hydro-Fibre Link would run north to the Hudson Bay coastal communities of Arviat, Whale Cove, Rankin Inlet and Chesterfield Inlet, with a western spur to Baker Lake. Its electricity would also feed two Agnico Eagle gold mines.

It’s more than a line drawn on a map, though: Studies and consultations with Indigenous communities have been underway since 2018, said Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin, Nukik’s CEO.

“At this time, preliminary engineering, including route design and tower selection, substation location and structure design is underway, as well as engagement with customers and utilities to get the project ready for financial close,” she told The Logic in an email. “Our schedule is currently planning to start construction toward the end of 2026.”

The Kivalliq Hydro-Fibre Line has a preliminary capital cost of $3 billion. Even with private investment and support from the Canada Infrastructure Bank, Nukik estimates it needs $1 billion in direct federal money.

Using the 2021 census’s counts of the people in the communities the link would reach—Rankin Inlet is the most populous, with 2,975 inhabitants—the call on the federal treasury works out to about $115,000 for each person.

It’s worth it, said Tattuinee.

“This project is about fighting climate change, economic reconciliation and self-determination for our people in Nunavut—Inuit people,” he said. The replacement of diesel with hydroelectric power alone would meet Nunavut’s 2030 targets for greenhouse-gas reductions, Nukik asserts.

Someday, the flow of electricity might even be reversed, the company says: the ability to connect to the southern grid could lead to energy from renewable sources like wind farms feeding demand in southern Canada.

The federal government’s moral support for the Kivalliq idea is deep; in a written statement, a spokesperson for Northern Affairs Minister Dan Vandal praised the environmental benefits of cleaner electricity and the social benefits of fast, reliable internet and telecom links.

“Our government strongly supports this Inuit-led nation building project, and we look forward to continuing to advance this project through Budget 2023’s historic clean-energy investments,” wrote Vandal’s press secretary Kyle Allen.

But in the budget, instead of $1 billion, Nukik got the promise of a 15 per cent tax credit for equipment costs and a mention of the Kivalliq Hydro-Fibre Link as one of several “projects across the North that support the transition away from diesel and in meeting emissions goals.”

Fifteen per cent of the full $3-billion capital expense is $450 million, less than half what Nukik says it needs. The federal government is still working on the terms of the tax credit, but according to Nukik, if the final credit does apply only to equipment, it will be worth less than $100 million.

For a project like the Kivalliq link, Tattuinee said, the tax credit is just not enough.

“We need the feds on board,” he said. “We need the federal government to give us a budget amount, obviously. They need to step up.”

The Canada Infrastructure Bank has been assisting since 2020, when the Kivalliq link was one of the agency’s early projects.

These days, spokesperson Ross Marowits told The Logic in an email, the federal bank is “providing ongoing support and advice on potential financial structures that would result in private-sector participation in the form of financing and risk-sharing on the project.” It might also invest in the link directly, though that’s not settled.

The more private money comes into the project, the more difficult it will be to retain Inuit ownership and control, though Audouin wrote that “Nukik and its Inuit leadership are working on structures that will ensure Inuit remain in a leadership position as the project proceeds to construction.”

“This has been in the talks for a long time, and we’re just so close and yet so far,” Tattuinee said. “This is not new technology. Every other jurisdiction in Canada is connected to transmission. It’s time that Nunavut gets what is a long time in coming.”

Clarification: This story has been updated to indicate the value of the proposed clean-energy tax credit if it applies only to the Kivalliq project’s equipment costs.