Disruptors

Powering the North: How the Kivalliq Hydro-Fibre Link Will Build A Stronger Canada

P.J. Akeeagok: When Canadians think about growth, we don’t always think about the Arctic, but we should. Nunavut has a place in this world and certainty is right here. Opportunity is right here. Nation building in Canada has never been completed. We built highways from the east coast all the way to the west coast, but now is our time to do the same in the Arctic.

P.J. Akeeagok: The Arctic is where sovereignty is tested and where the next gains in critical minerals could be unlocked. Nunavut is ready and Nunavut is ripe. A productive, a resilient Arctic is a national project. It means dependable energy, connectivity, and transportation delivered in ways that truly reflect Inuit rights, knowledges, as well as priorities.

John Stackhouse: That’s P.J. Akeeagok, the sixth premier of Nunavut, or as he’s known to pretty much everyone in the north PJ.

P.J. Akeeagok: With the announcement of the Iqaluit Hydro Project, we see the first of four nation-building pillars, taking shape: clean, reliable energy for our capital, anchoring sovereignty, resilience, and opportunity.

P.J. Akeeagok: Canada is starting to recognize the Arctic is essential to sovereignty and to our prosperity. Alongside the Kivalliq Hydro Fibre Link, Northern Transportation Corridors and Arctic Digital Backbone. These projects complete Canada’s unfinished work of nation-building. Our peers across the Arctic have invested steadily and acted with clear timelines.

P.J. Akeeagok: Canada could do the same. We need Canada to join us to treat the Arctic, not as a pilot, but truly as a pillar. Plan with indigenous leadership, financed with certainty and built to last. This is our moment to complete nation-building together. I’m John Stackhouse. Welcome to

John Stackhouse: Disruptors the Canada Project. This season we’re crisscrossing the country to meet the builders who are using technology to tackle our toughest problems. Along the way, sketch a blueprint for a stronger, more competitive nation. Today’s destination, Nunavut’s Kivalliq region.

John Stackhouse: The Arctic isn’t a postcard, it’s a pillar of Canada. For generations, our sovereignty has rested on a real presence in the north.

People living there, working there, raising families there. And beneath that land lies some of the world’s most important reserves of critical minerals, the inputs for batteries, grids, and the cleaner economy we keep talking about. Here’s something you might not know. Canada’s Arctic still runs on imported diesel and connects to the world through satellite networks that we don’t control.

John Stackhouse: That means high volatile power costs for families and businesses, and an internet that freezes when the bandwidth does. Meanwhile, across the Nordic Arctic in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and Denmark, remote communities are tied into national grids and fiber backbones. In other words, they’ve wired their north and we haven’t, at least not yet and that matters.

John Stackhouse: When we don’t control the energy and connectivity that keep communities running, we create national vulnerabilities, economic, social, and strategic. That is no longer acceptable for a G7 country. An Inuit owned project aims to change that equation. The Kivalliq Hydro-Fiber Link, a 1200 kilometer corridor delivering clean electricity and true high-speed internet from Manitoba to none of it.

John Stackhouse: It can cut diesel, use and emissions and give families, schools, and businesses a line they can trust no matter the weather. And it does something bigger. It powers Canada’s next economy in the north critical minerals projects that need steady low carbon energy and real connectivity to hire locally, automate and compete globally.

John Stackhouse: Built for permafrost and 40 below. A nation building test we can actually pass. Our guest today is Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin CEO of the Nukik Corporation, the Inuit owned developer leading the Kivalliq energy and fiber build. With more than 15 years in major projects and indigenous partnerships, Anne Raphael focused on a simple goal, reliable power, and real connectivity that work in 40 below and that work for people who live there.

John Stackhouse: We started by asking Anne-Raphaëlle, what’s the pitch for this project?

Anne Raphaele: The project is called the Kivalliq Hydro-Fibre Link. It’s an ambitious Arctic project that intends to connect the Canadian Arctic to Southern electrical grid and fiber-optic network by connecting around the Churchill area, crossing the border into Nunavut, taking five communities off of diesel, plus active operating mines, and bringing full broadband connectivity into the territory.

Anne Raphaele: It’s important to know that Nunavut is very much relying on antiquated systems because a hundred percent of all the energy needs in the territory have to be met by burning diesel. So everyday life, everyday business, everyday government operations, everything functions by burning diesel. And most of the diesel we burn in the Arctic comes from foreign countries most years.

Anne Raphaele: It’s actually a hundred percent that all the diesel that is imported into the territory that comes from foreign countries, mostly the United States. And then on the connectivity piece, to give you the full picture. We rely mostly now on Starlink, which is amazing technology, but it’s not domestic technology..

Anne Raphaele: It’s number one driven by the people who have to really live under third world conditions in the north, which is unacceptable. And B, it’s really about national security because the Canadian Arctic in Nunavut is a real Achilles heel at this time. We’re heading into a wall with no energy or connectivity optionality whatsoever.

Anne Raphaele: When you look at the map of Sweden, Finland, Russia, Norway, they’ve built roads, they’ve built networks, they’ve built high voltage transmission lines, and they did that decades ago. Name me, one nation around the world that is powering a modern society solely on diesel. It just doesn’t exist.

John Stackhouse: Before we dive into the engineering behind this new project, let’s get our bearings. The Fibre-Link Corridor runs up the west coast of Hudson Bay from northern Manitoba. Near Churchill then follows the Kivalliq communities north before turning inland to Baker Lake or Qamani’tuaq, as it’s known in Inuktitut. The goal is simple. Connect household schools and clinics first, while giving local employers the reliability they need to plan and grow.

John Stackhouse: We asked Anne-Raphaëlle to walk us along the path from Churchill through places like Arviat, Whale Cove, Rankin Inlet, Chesterfield Inlet, and on to Baker Lake, and explain who gets connected first.

Anne Raphaele: The line would connect around Churchill, and so we would take that line, take it 1000 kilometers north, and address all the different hamlets along the way, which are five of them.

Anne Raphaele: Then take it inland West towards Baker Lake, which is the only inland community in the Kivalliq region and power existing mining operations, mostly Agnico Eagle mines mining operation, which is 20 kilometers off of Rankin Inlet.

John Stackhouse: Let’s ground this in everyday life so it’s easier to picture. Imagine the changes for a family, a school, and a clinic. Once the community can count on steady power and real broadband, rather than diesel and a satellite link.

Anne Raphaele: Day in and day out, you’re burning a diesel that is damaging your health. Those diesel plants weren’t built 50 kilometers out of the hamlets, they are right downtown, near schools, near hospitals, near homes. The diesel you burn in the Arctic is called Arctic grade diesel, and it is much more polluting, much more health affecting than regular diesel that you put in your car in maybe Toronto or Ottawa. Just because it has to resist some pretty harsh climatic conditions in terms of everyday life.

Anne Raphaele: It’s transformative. That’s the beauty of being connected to the grid as well, is now you’re not only connected to the next city, but you’re connected to the North American grid. The real benefit of North America is really a connected web, and the grid unfortunately is more connected north south, as in Canada US than it is north, south, as in, you know, Canadian to Canadian provinces and territories.

Anne Raphaele: We’ve been better neighbors to the US than we have to our own fellow Canadians. When I started working for Nukik Corporation four years ago, I could have never had even just a teams call without the camera on because the connectivity was so spotty. It has gotten much better with Starlink, but again, how resilient are we and how much can we say that we have a sovereign arctic if we rely on non-domestic assets and foreign owned technologies?  It’s just a slogan at that point to talk about arctic sovereignty in Canada.

John Stackhouse: Once Nunavut gets connected to the grid, a number of overdue systemic improvements suddenly become possible.

Anne Raphaele: The fibre it’s gonna power and allow telehealth to happen. Reduce medical evacuation. Now you have the ability to have a doctor online powered and supported by terrestrial fibre, as reliable as we experience anywhere else in the country, and then it’s transformational for education. People won’t have to leave the territory to have access to long-term education.

John Stackhouse: One corridor doing two jobs is part of the efficiency here. The same right of way that carries electricity, can carry the fibre that keeps clinics, classrooms, and local businesses online, while also supporting industrial operations.

Anne Raphaele: You have to run fibre optic anyways in a transmission line of this length. And in modern assets, high voltage, you typically nowadays run fiber optic for the maintenance and operation of your line. We are just going to bring more so that we can serve the communities, serve the businesses, serve the mines, and different, you know, broadband off-takers that, uh, maybe interested in, in the fibre optic.

John Stackhouse: It’s an ambitious and necessary idea, but the challenge lies in how you build efficiently across permafrost and 40 below.

Anne Raphaele: The project will be a technical feat, just, uh, just by its sheer realization because we’re talking of hundreds and hundreds of towers built into the tundra, into Nunavut, and into sections of it, into permafrost.

Anne Raphaele: The way to do it is to anchor it as much as possible and as deep as possible to use a certain type of transmission tower that resists to high winds, and that is designed to withstand those climatic conditions that tend to be quite extreme in the Arctic. It’s really gonna be groundbreaking, and we’ve never done it here in Canada.

Anne Raphaele: Other nations have done it in the seventies, in the eighties, they’ve made it happen. They were innovators of their days. But also it’s a technology that has so much proof of concept, right? The first transmission line commission in North America was commissioned, I think in 1889. There’s an ability to be innovators and to build the next chapter of your country with vision by leveraging the known expertise that is in your country.

Anne Raphaele: And we are builders in Canada. In the 1800’s, we built the Canadian railway, and at the time there were maybe 3 million people in Canada. We didn’t build it for 40 million Canadians, but the founders of Canada knew that the country was gonna grow, knew that this was the vision. And so, the innovation sometimes is not necessarily in the technology itself.

Anne Raphaele: I would say it’s in the leadership, in the vision, in believing in its people and saying, okay, we’re gonna embrace technology that is available now, purpose it to the needs of the terrain of the people, of the purpose, and make it happen over maybe sometimes very ambitious targets and distances. And just go for it.

John Stackhouse: Just go for it, it’s a clear imperative if ever there was one. Ultimately, this is a corridor story. Northern Manitoba and the Port of Churchill are part of the same ecosystem as the Kivalliq. If we do this right, we’ll have people, goods, data, and opportunity moving more reliably in both directions. So the big question then becomes how do Churchill and the Kivalliq rise together, and what does that pairing unlock for the region?

Anne Raphaele: You won’t see a port of Churchill that thrives without a Kivalliq region that thrives. You won’t see a port of Churchill that really taps into the full breadth of the value proposition of new inflow and outflow from the port without a Kivalliq region that becomes developed with, you know, new mines. There’s a modular home factory in Arviat.

Anne Raphaele: Those materials are gonna be barged in from Churchill. You cannot have and realize the full potential of the region without interlocking the two priorities in April of 2025. I was lucky enough to, I think, witness history in the making when Premier Kinew and Premier Akeeagok, together to sign a joint announcement on the creation of a strategic energy and economic corridor between their two jurisdiction.

John Stackhouse: We managed to dig out the CPAC recording of that historic signing. If you’re curious,

P.J. Akeeagok: uh, first off, it’s, uh, an honor to be here. Uh, always, uh, great to, to be able to work with you, uh, really as, as Canadians. Uh, it is. What a historic moment that we’re in. Uh, I just really wanna recognize the incredible leadership. Uh, that has brought us here. Uh, this has been the vision of many Inuit leaders that wanted to connect, uh, Southern Canada to the north and this is nation building, and so we’re very excited to be able to work with such a incredible partner. We already share many of our, uh, common interest from healthcare to education among others, but now to be able to look at what we could do together, uh, really excites me. So I’m very honored to be here and to be welcomed to your beautiful province.

Wab Kinew: So welcome to Manitoba and lets put pen to paper.

Anne Raphaele: And that was done in the context of Premier Kinew repatriating, 500 megawatts of expiring hydro exports to the US and saying we’re gonna do a carve out and we are gonna do that, carve out for the Kivalliq Hydro-Fibre link and we’re gonna allocate 50 megawatt of that 500 to Nunavut.

Anne Raphaele: Nothing had ever been done like this before. We have some expiring contracts. We’d rather be good neighbors to our Inuit brothers and sisters rather than, you know, selling it to the US who are turning their back on us at this time during the trade dispute. So there were a lot of things happening, but I think it was really moving to be in that room when the two premiers signed the announcement and took the lead on saying, we are Indigenous leaders and we are gonna stand hand in hand and make history here.

John Stackhouse: I love this idea of close collaboration and sharing of priorities, and for a big infrastructure project like this, when it comes to cost versus value, what should Canadians know about jobs GDP and payback?

Anne Raphaele: Yes, the project capital cost is high, $3 billion, but you know, the benefits are proportionally as high $3.2 billion GDP contribution during construction alone, more than 15,000 person years of employment. Millions and millions of revenues in terms of taxes, payrolls, royalties.

The one thing to understand, at the end of the day, this is not a diesel displacement project. It’s not even a fiber project. It’s a critical and strategic infrastructure project, and it’s, it’s a critical differentiation because it transforms how you’re gonna approach the investment.

Anne Raphaele: It’s not that insurmountable to build infrastructure in the Arctic, and it is important to understand the mining potential, specifically in the Kivalliq region of Nunavut is world class. In that area, we’re sitting on all sorts of critical mineral in one of the largest greenstone belts that exists in North America that is still completely untapped.

Anne Raphaele: The uranium deposit is akin to what we’re seeing in the Athabasca deposits in Saskatchewan and potentially what could redefine what could be the economic engine of Canada.

John Stackhouse: So we need to call it what it is, strategic infrastructure that powers a new economic engine. Our Arctic peers in other northern countries made these bets decades ago. We can still catch up and on our terms. Inuit owned, cleaner, smarter commissioning is targeted for 2032. So we asked Ann Raphael to paint us the 10 year picture.

Anne Raphaele: 2032, we are planning on energizing the line, so a 10 year outlook. After commissioning, you’ll see more connected people bring more connected mindsets, more connected businesses. Businesses that start and stay and remain in the Arctic because now they’re connected to the fabric. They have a place to reliably power their operations. Not just mining. I think this will be a critical enabler of a lot of things, and that again, is the defining value of the project is that by investing in a project like the Kivalliq Hydro Fibre-Link, you send a clear message to the people who live there, that it’s not just about planting a Canadian flag and then claiming that we are Arctic sovereign, but it’s about telling those people that they matter.

Anne Raphaele: That they deeply matter, that their future matters. That yes, there are Canadians. They’re not just Canadians when we wanna assert our sovereignty, but that we believe in their future. We believe in their contribution, workwise and in other ways, and that we’re gonna give a future to their children.

John Stackhouse: We’ll give P.J. the last word.

P.J. Akeeagok: You know, it’s incredible to see the unity from coast to coast to coast in terms of our opportunity that we see as a country. The Arctic truly has what the world needs. We’ve made in true partnership with, in identifying four projects that really mean the criteria of what we could do to build a strong, resilient country.

P.J. Akeeagok: It means training and jobs that stay in the north and public service that works 40 below that open up markets, whether it’s the deep sea port in that can unlock incredible fisheries where we could supply the world. With our resources, whether it’s the Arctic security corridor or the Grays Bay Rode and Port Project that can allow us to become a super power in terms of supplying the world of critical minerals among many, or whether it’s the Kivalliq Hydro-Fibre Link that would connect Southern Canada to the Arctic for the first time and complete true nation building as we move forward.

John Stackhouse: For generations, the North has tested Canada’s resolve and defined our sovereignty. Families from Arviat to Baker Lake have built communities in 40 below, relying on foreign diesel and bandwidth we don’t control. The Kivalliq Hydro-Fibre Link corridor isn’t just about cleaner power and faster internet. It’s about ending that dependency so schools don’t suffer, clinics don’t close, and local businesses can plan for growth. This is strategic infrastructure. It unlocks world-class critical minerals under the Kivalliq.  Metals for batteries, grids, and industry on terms that keep more value in Canada and in the north. It strengthens a northern corridor anchored by Churchill, tying people goods and data to a future we build, not one we rent, and it moves us towards parity with other Arctic nations that wired their North years ago. The question isn’t whether Canada needs Arctic capability. It’s whether we’ll choose to build it at home with Inuit leadership and the certainty that turns plans into projects from the west shore of Hudson Bay to the rest of the country.

John Stackhouse: You can see how much opportunity there is for Canada if we wire it. You’ve been listening to Disruptors: The Canada Project. Thanks for joining us on this incredible journey across Canada. There’s much more ahead. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a review and five star rating.

John Stackhouse: It helps others discover the show and you can learn much more about this project and other RBC thought leadership initiatives at rbc.com/thought leadership. Join us next time. As we continue our journey across the country, in search of the innovators and leaders who are helping Canada meet this moment boldly with their eyes on the future.

John Stackhouse: I’m John Stackhouse, thanks for listening.