Disruptors

Link to the World: How Manitoba Is Rebuilding a Northern Trade Route

Premier Wab Kinew: Little old Manitoba is having a big moment, a wealth of critical minerals, a clean energy grid, access to tide water, a direct trade road to Europe, and hardworking people. I think we’re about to surprise a lot of people across Canada.

John Stackhouse: That’s Premier Wab Kinew, and he’s right. Manitoba is having a moment.

John Stackhouse: The world is changing. Supply chains are shifting, and Canada is realizing that sovereignty isn’t just about borders. It’s how we get what we produce to the rest of the world.

Premier Wab Kinew: Canada’s at a critical moment for our economy and for our shared future. In a time of tariffs and nation building projects, Manitoba is leading the way. We might just have a national unity project as well. In this moment, we’re going to be a game changer. When we build Manitoba, we not only make our province stronger, but we also make all of Canada stronger

John Stackhouse: As the world redraws its trade maps. Manitoba is positioning itself as Canada’s third coast connecting the prairies to global markets through the north. It’s a story of resilience, reconciliation, and reorientation for the country’s economy.

Premier Wab Kinew: Here at the heart of the continent. We’re building the critical infrastructure that connects our country and brings our goods to the world, but we can’t do it alone. Together with indigenous nations, with businesses, and with all levels of government, we can deliver more good jobs and a stronger economy for all of us.  Little old Manitoba making big things happen.

John Stackhouse: I’m John Stackhouse. Welcome to Disruptors the Canada Project. This season we’re crisscrossing the country to meet the leaders and innovators, making bold moves at a pivotal moment for all of Canada. In the process, creating a blueprint for a stronger, more competitive nation.

Today’s destination is Manitoba, the heart of the continent, where a new trade corridor is taking shape on the edge of the Arctic. The Port of Churchill has long been imagined as Canada’s northern gateway. Now it’s being rebuilt by indigenous and northern communities to give our exporters something they’ve never had before, A third coast to serve as a gateway to the world.

We’ll meet Chris Avery of the Arctic Gateway Group and Grant Barkman of Decision works to explore how in drone powered innovation have restored a critical Northern Rail link unlocking the Port of Churchill and giving Canada flexibility, independence, and a northern trade route to the world. This northern route depends on the Arctic Gateway Group, led by Chris Avery, who’s working with indigenous and northern communities to reconnect Canada to the world through the north.

John Stackhouse: Let me start with the Arctic Gateway Group. Tell us a bit about it and the ambition.

Chris Avery: Arctic Gateway Group owns and operates the Hudson Bay Railway, the Port of Churchill, and the Churchill Marine Tank Farm. We in turn are, um, owned by One North, which is a consortium of 29 First Nations and 12 Northern Manitoba communities. So largely indigenous owned. The Port of Churchill is the gateway for the vast resources of Western Canada to global markets in Europe, middle East, Africa, south America, even Latin America.

John Stackhouse: Churchill has been a dream of many visionaries for generations as a gateway. What’s different now that will allow you to do what others before you have not been able to achieve

Chris Avery: In an era where President Trump is applying tariffs to Canadian goods and talking about Canada as a 51st state, and Canada needing to look to diversify its trade, become a global energy superpower, and really assert our sovereignty in the North. Churchill now, once again, has become a strategic asset for Canada.

John Stackhouse: Take us deeper, Chris, into the tech transformation in infrastructure. You’ve got three legs of the challenge here, the rail across some pretty rugged terrain to get all the goods to the coast and the port itself. And then of course, the water between Churchill and those markets you referenced go, pretty far north. So multiple challenges on each of those fronts. How is technology helping you?

Chris Avery: About 50% of Canada’s geography has permafrost present, and as a result, much of our linear infrastructure, whether it’s roads or railways or pipelines, go through permafrost, and we are very adept at dealing with this.

Chris Avery: So more specifically for the Hudson Bay Railway, we utilize great technology to help us understand what’s happening in the ground. So for example. We have, uh, ground penetrating radars that are mounted onto our locomotives. And as the locomotives are traveling over our tracks, it’s gathering data on what’s happening in the ground underneath the tracks. You know, how frozen is it? How stable is the ground underneath. We also use drone technology that wasn’t available before to us. To fly over the tracks and really measure the geometries of the track and look at how level the track is and look and identify where there may be problems. So, whether you have overflowing rivers or ponds or beaver dams that are causing, uh, trouble away from the railway tracks, the drones are able to fly over and identify where there might be issues as well.

John Stackhouse: Keeping that railway open through permafrost and floods isn’t easy, but it’s vital. And now technology is giving Northern operators the tools to predict and prevent problems before they happen. One of the innovators helping Arctic Gateway do just that, is a Manitoba based company that’s taken drone inspection to a whole new level.  Meet Grant Barkman. He’s the president and director of flight operations for decision works.

Grant Barkman: We started decision works almost 20 years ago with the primary idea in mind that if people spend too much time making decisions, it slows the process of innovation down. It slows the process of project completion down. Effective decision making, meaning having all the right information at hand drives positive change faster, and ultimately leads to greater efficiency in the work processes that decisions are driving.

John Stackhouse: To reach Churchill, there’s really only one way in by rail. The Hudson Bay railway runs almost a thousand kilometers north from the Pas Transporting goods by rail in the north isn’t easy. Muskeg and permafrost mean that the ground under the rail line is literally shifting. Grant and his team at Decision Works were brought in to help the railway tackle a challenge unique to this remote line grant. And the team came up with a solution called Track Sense. It’s a unique rail infrastructure monitoring platform.

Grant Barkman: They’ve built a rail line essentially on top of a shifting foundation. It’s a constantly shifting foundation. So, the rail line itself does need to move. It needs to move laterally. It needs to move vertically.  They came to us and said, our biggest issue is that we work in the remotest environments in Northern Manitoba, and we must continually monitor our rail from a safety perspective, is there anything you can do to address that issue? Track sense provides them with a toolkit that allows ’em to do the same level of inspections, in some cases, even better quality inspections than they do today.  And do it very, very efficiently without disrupting any of the rail traffic that’s generating revenue. When a railway operator, like Hudson Bay Railway puts their crews out on the track to do manual inspection, they can’t be running revenue, earning stock at the same time. So capturing that same inspection data with a drone flying over the track, it provides them with not only the quality of inspections, but it also facilitates them earning revenue at the same time by running stock underneath us.

John Stackhouse: Monitoring the line in such a remote location is challenging. Grant says Track Sense uses the drones and predictive analytics to interpret images and complex data spotting problems before they become disasters.

Grant Barkman: Early indications, for example, of overland flooding, understanding water flow patterns and water basin data and so on, were able to predict well ahead of impacts affecting the railway infrastructure.  We’re able to predict the likelihood of a flooding event that could cause a major disruption to the infrastructure and therefore derailments are worse. So that’s an area that we are very dedicated to working on predictive capabilities wherever possible water, overland flooding is probably the most significant predictive issue that we are looking to resolve and looking to solve for all infrastructure owners, whether it be railways, highways, or whatever.  The other area is forest fire risk. So we can identify the relative risk of forest fire based on the forest fire fuel conditions that exist within any particular area. This is also a very significant predictor of future events. So, if we can see a high-risk area of forest fuel. We can also monitor that area more continuously identifying early identification of fires that can be responded quickly before they become out of control.

Grant Barkman: So that’s another very significant area. So hydrology and forest fire are the two biggest areas. The other one is just around trending and trend analysis on track itself. There are what we call areas of interest that are perennial problem spots that move regularly based on seasonality, based on temperature, based on water flow patterns, et cetera. So being able to more continuously monitor those areas, seeing trends developing and then responding. To those trends before they become significant issues, before they cause actual events like derailments and so on. Predictively and proactively, and these are some of our ongoing goals at Track Sense and working with partners to go even beyond that to say at a more macro level, let’s look at the combination of all these events and drive out a risk model, if you will.  For the entire network and say, where’s our highest risk of potential issue? Let’s proactively direct our limited crew resource, our limited human resource to those highest risk areas. I think looking at it holistically is probably the next major step that we’re going to take as we start to pull all these different incidents into track sense. Analyze them for relative risk and start presenting those back to the railway owners to say, here’s how you can proactively invest your maintenance budget, your maintenance dollars, your maintenance resources to drive the highest value in reducing risk within your railway network. In general, I think that’s where we’re going, and ai, generative ai and predictive AI is a very significant part of that.

John Stackhouse: As you heard, these high-tech drones are now mapping, measuring and predicting risks, turning large amounts of raw data into real-time decisions in the most remote areas, more data, more analysis, faster turnaround time, and that shift just isn’t about safety, it’s about keeping Canada’s Northern lifelines open year round, and the array of high-tech drones, grant and his team use are pretty impressive.

Grant Barkman: Vertical takeoff and landing fixed wing drones, which is a specialized area of drone tech. Wingra is the orange drone that you see. It’s what they call a tail sitter drone. It takes off and lands vertically, but transitions to horizontal flight. Very much like SpaceX. The SpaceX maneuvers, it’s a very cool drone to fly and it’s, uh, orange because orange is the color we can see the furthest as humans. It’s a very advanced survey and mapping drone. We also fly drones from a company called Quantum. Quantum has vertical takeoff and landing drones, but they take off and land in a horizontal orientation with tilt rotors or tilt propellers, so they take off vertically and then tilt the rotors forward to transition to horizontal flight

John Stackhouse: Five to 10 years out you have to wonder what will have in how we operate Northern Rail from a control room. Here’s grant’s prediction

Grant Barkman: Long range. Beyond visual line of sight operations and you know, we’ve been actively involved in that for a few years now. The regulation has changed or is just about to change such so that we can fly much longer-range flights from a central point. We don’t necessarily have to even have pilots on the ground in all these locations where drones are being utilized. We can fly them from a central point anywhere that we’re network connected effectively, we can operate drones remotely. So that’s a very significant change. Now, you combine that with some of the other technologies coming along, like Drone in a Box Solutions where you can put a drone in a location that itself recharges itself. It downloads its data or uploads its data, depending on what you’re doing, whether your flight planning or collecting the data from a flight. So, it has an independence, and you can launch that drone again remotely. So, we’re gonna see drone swarming becoming much more part of the strategy here. Drone swarming, meaning multiple drones, doing multiple jobs at the same time, but control from a single point.

Grant Barkman: So, it’s gonna become a much more efficient technology over the next five years. And then coupled a course with the advancements in ai, the advancements in real time object detection and ai. Along with onboard compute capability on the drone itself.

John Stackhouse: Visionaries like Grant and his team at Decision Works have taken a legacy piece of infrastructure and reinvigorated it through a combination of predictive analytics and drone technology. It’s a novel combination, but is Canada ready to scale this up?

Grant Barkman: Canada is leading in so many areas within the drone industry globally. We have some innovation in this country that is way beyond what people are seeing today, and a lot of that, again, is back to regulations, holding them back. Canada is already leading in several very key areas and can maintain that leadership position through smart investments, through leveraged investments, through collaboration and government, and regulators can play a very significant role in, uh, facilitating those kinds of collaborations. The wheels of government just move so slowly when it comes to approving new technology and innovation.

John Stackhouse: Manitoba is proving how technology can make some of the toughest infrastructure in the world smarter, safer, and more connected. If Canada can learn from this, if we can embrace new technologies with open arms and apply them across the north in a way that works closely with indigenous communities, imagine what that could unlock for Canada’s economy idea of the North 3.0. Here’s Chris Avery again from Arctic Gateway Group.

Chris Avery: What Churchill allows us to do is to diversify our trade beyond any one partner. So certainly, when President Trump came into power and tariffs were levied against Canadian goods and there were talks of 51st State, you know, it really amplified the need for us as a nation to diversify our trade and give ourselves optionality’s, another port option, aside from the ports and the borders that we have today. So, I think that’s a really important thing is the Port of Churchill and the Hudson Bay railway allows us to diversify our trade. Right now, it’s a us but if it’s not the US today, it could be something in Asia tomorrow or in another part of the world another time. So having that diversity of options for Canadian trade just makes a ton of sense.

Chris Avery: Credit to Premier Canoe in Manitoba and Prime Minister Carney for having visions of Manitoba truly being a maritime province. And I think if you look ahead 10 years from now. You’ll see the growth of Churchill and Northern Manitoba, truly as a gateway to other markets, including Europe, middle East, Africa, south America, and a gateway for the vast resources we have in Western Canada and Alberta and Saskatchewan and in Manitoba, and really leverage those resources for the good of the country

John Stackhouse: With better data and stronger rail Churchill isn’t just a port, it’s a proving ground for a new kind of Canadian infrastructure. And of course, none of it would be happening without participation and ownership by Northern First Nations. You mentioned the role of government and also there’s a foundational role for First Nations and indigenous communities.Walk us through the capital structure and the ownership model that you’ve been developing and what that may signal for other communities and provinces across the country that are looking to bring in all sorts of new capital to finance these sorts of projects.

Chris Avery: Maybe to answer that question, I might take a step back. This set of infrastructure with the port, the railway, the airport, you know, it’s a great set of infrastructure to facilitate our trade and also help us assert our sovereignty in the north. And more recently, given the geopolitical situation with the US, it has become even more important. And this set of assets was, you know, back in 96, was sold to American interests and the American interest owned the asset, but really didn’t invest properly into the asset, and it was neglected for decades. And that accumulated into the railway washing out in 2017 and it was washed out for 18 months, essentially cutting off the northern communities in Northern Manitoba, in central Nono it, which depended on Churchill for a lot of its supplies. So it was at that time that Canada bought the infrastructure in partnership with the Arctic Gateway Group, which is the indigenous owned organization, to take the ownership back from the Americans. So right now, Arctic Gateway Group, as I said, is owned by One North, which is a consortium of 29 First Nations and 12 Northern Manitoba communities, and it’s a unique form of indigenous economic reconciliation. Now you really don’t see anywhere else in Canada. In fact, we were, uh, recently at the First Nations Major Project Coalition in Toronto. Large organizations were talking about how they were looking for indigenous participation in their projects. And you know, when we got up, we sort of talked about how we’re already indigenous owned. We’re not a joint venture. We’re not partly or percentage owned by First Nations. We’re largely indigenous owned.

John Stackhouse: Churchill’s revival is about more than infrastructure. It’s economic reconciliation in action led by indigenous communities, unlocking new opportunities for all of Canada. What lets you move quickly now?

Chris Avery: We’re an operating port and operating railway in a set of infrastructure that already exists, whether you’re talking about the town site that can handle a large population to an airport, to the port and the railway itself. We’ve shipped 10,000 tons of critical minerals recently. We have a number of vessels coming in to supply the Nunavut region and the central, uh, Keal region in Nunavut. And we expect to have agricultural products moving through the port this year. So, this is very much a set of assets that already exist today, and now we can move at speed to really, fully leverage it for the benefits of today and to address the issues of our times today.

John Stackhouse: As the ship’s return to Hudson Bay, Churchill is once again showing how northern infrastructure can move at the speed of opportunity. When you think about the year or years ahead, what will be the biggest challenges?

Chris Avery: Some conversations that people have that says in three and a half more years, when President Trump is no longer in office, we don’t have to worry about this. So. Maybe some of the fears that I have is not seizing the moment and making sure that we’re prepared for the future and believing that things will come back to the way they were after three and a half years and so on.

Chris Avery: We will always be very strong trading partners with the us, but fundamentally, as the Prime Minister has said, and the Premier has said, the relationship has changed. And then as I said, you know, we have a trade deal with the US that may last or that may not last. We don’t know. And then if it’s not the US it could be something in Asia or other parts of the world. So having this optionality and having diversity of trade is really important for Canada.

John Stackhouse: Chris, you’ve just nailed the very purpose of our podcast series that’s looking at this phenomenal moment of economic transition and the whole excitement around Build, baby Build, which really should be labeled Innovate Baby Innovate, because that’s exactly what we must do. Nowhere more than in the north and the far north, as you’ve just explained we can do that with Rail. How is technology then transforming the port side of the operations and what you’ll be developing in Churchill?

Chris Avery: The port itself is almost over 80 years old, and it was a port of strategic importance for Canada back in the day when agriculture products were our primary exports. And of course that’s changed. Agricultural products is still a big part of our export. Other things have overtaken it, and maybe in the meantime, the port has been underutilized. The set of infrastructure that we have in Canada, the port, the railway that connects to the port to the rest of North America, an airport with a 9,200 foot runway in a town infrastructure that’s capable of supporting a lot more than its supports today. This whole set of infrastructure is now underutilized, but it’s now a strategic asset for our day and time today.

John Stackhouse: The Port of Churchill and the Hudson Bay Railway isn’t just about reopening a port; it’s about reopening possibilities from drones to data to indigenous partnerships. The Port of Churchill is redefining what it means to build a resilient nation, one that trades on its own terms and connects every coast. Churchill isn’t just Manitoba’s story, it’s part of Canada’s next chapter in sovereignty and trade. The rail line to Hudson Bay has weathered, floods, frost foreign ownership, and decades of neglect. But today, it stands as a reminder of what we can achieve when we bet on ourselves and each other as the world rethinks trade energy and sovereignty.  Canada’s third coast. Right here in Manitoba signals how Canada can adapt by thinking bigger, reaching farther, and looking north. This has been another episode of Disruptors: The Canada Project, an RBC podcast. If you want to hear our complete series on Canadian innovators who are helping Canada chart a new course, subscribe to Disruptors wherever you get your podcasts, and better yet, give us a five star rating. Visit rbc.com/thoughtleadership I’m John Stackhouse.  Thanks for listening.