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Prime Minister Stephen Harper has a strong vision for Canada’s North, but what stands out in his latest trip to the region is the immense challenge of making it a reality.
RAGLAN MINE, QUE. — It was a long way to come for what seems like comparatively little. Prime Minister Stephen Harper arrived in Inuit territory Friday in northern Quebec, 400 kilometres above the tree line, to visit a nickel mine and talk about clean energy.
Or at least the exciting possibility of it. Last year, the Conservative government injected $720,000 into a feasibility test that one day may help resolve the problem of shipping diesel to the North to power many Arctic communities and lower costs of massive mining developments trying to operate far from hydro dams and other sources of energy.
Yet like so much of what the Conservative government leader has tried to do on his eighth trip to the Arctic, what stands out is the immense challenge of it all. Harper has defended his record and called his investments in the North “groundbreaking,” though he has not quite lived up to his early boastful promises of armed icebreakers and brand-new deepwater sea ports for the region.
He met with Inuit leaders, who called the event “historic,” but Harper made no promises and the leaders cautioned that governments need to listen to them more in the rush to exploit their resources.
But Harper came to the windy rocky barrens in the Inuit region known as Nunavik to show off a success story.
Xstrata, which was taken over by Glencore in May, has been hauling nickel and other minerals out of the ground for nearly 20 years. It reached agreements with the local Inuit communities, and now employs nearly 160 Inuit workers at wages ranging from $19-$32 an hour.
It relies on diesel shipped into Deception Bay 100 km to the south, and trucked north to power its operations that produce nickel, but also copper and cobalt concentrate from four mines, with a fifth under construction — an expensive operation that burns fossil fuels and pumps greenhouse gases into the Arctic air.
The project Harper has backed here is the first of its kind. Glencore has partnered with TUGLIQ Energy Co., a Quebec start-up enterprise, to test three technologies, in the hope of finding a way to store wind-generated power.
Winds blast across this treeless Mars-like terrain, reaching speeds of 99 nautical miles an hour, but they fluctuate like anywhere, and surplus power generated cannot be easily stored. Glencore will test hydrolyzing water in fuel cells, using a flywheel, and batteries to warehouse the excess power generated by turbines. A 2.3-megawatt wind turbine facility is to be completed next year.
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