Energy Drivers - What does nation building look like in Canada’s Arctic, and why does it matter for energy security, reconciliation, and economic sovereignty?

00:00:01 - 00:01:29

Lance Mortlock

Welcome to the next episode of the Energy Drivers Podcast. I’m Lance Mortlock, your host for today’s discussion with Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin. She’s the Chief Executive Officer of Nukik Corporation. And throughout our series, we invite Canadian energy and industrial leaders to engage in discussions on key issues, share insights and pose challenging questions. Today, we’re pleased to welcome Anne-Raphaëlle, who leads the Nukik Corporation and is closely involved in advancing Kivalliq Hydro-Fibre Link, a transformative project aimed at connecting Nunavut to Manitoba’s clean electricity grid and high-speed fibre infrastructure.

She is also a member of the Joint Public Advisory Committee at the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation and previously served as the Chair of the organization in 2025. As attention increasingly turns to the Arctic, driven by energy security, climate resilience and northern development, the Kivalliq project represents a compelling example of Indigenous-led nation building infrastructure. Anne-Raphaëlle, thank you for joining our podcast. It’s a pleasure to have you here. I’ve been looking forward to this.

00:01:30 - 00:01:33

Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin

Thank you for having me. Yes, likewise.

00:01:34 - 00:01:39

Lance Mortlock

So to kick things off, where are you today? Are you in the Arctic?

00:01:40 - 00:01:42

Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin

I’m in the Arctic. I’m in beautiful Rankin Inlet.

00:01:43 - 00:01:44

Lance Mortlock

How’s the weather this morning?

00:01:45 - 00:02:09

Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin

It’s okay. You know, people here will tell you we’ve had a rough spring and definitely a rough winter, very cold, lots of blizzards. But spring is finally here, so you know, it’s a special time in the Arctic because you really feel that sense of rebirth and everybody’s out on the land and fishing derbies, hunting, everything happens again.

00:02:10 - 00:02:25

Lance Mortlock

That sounds awesome. Maybe just start for some of our listeners that might be less familiar with the Nukik Corporation and your role. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, Nukik’s mandate and the vision, I guess overall, guiding your work?

00:02:26 - 00:04:34

Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin

Yeah. No problem. So as you said, I’m the CEO for Nukik Corporation. I lead infrastructure initiatives in the Arctic that span telecommunication and energy projects of small and large scale. My background is in environmental law and natural resources management and also mining, which serves me well because there’s a lot of “all of the above” here at play in the Arctic.

Nukik itself, Nukik Corporation is 100% Inuit owned. It’s owned by the Kivalliq Inuit Association on a majority basis, which is the political arm in the Kivalliq region, and by KIA’s regional development. So Economic Development Corporation, which is called Sakku Investments Corporation. So that’s really the Inuit ownership is the beating heart of the project. In 2021, the Kivalliq Inuit Association, who had been leading the Kivalliq Hydro-Fibre Link for, 5-10 years already before, realized that the project was getting almost too much momentum and was growing so much that it needed a corporate vehicle.

It needed a dedicated team and it needed that focused attention on the project and on the integration of the different energy and telecommunications dynamics. So in 2021, Inuit leadership incorporated the project under Nukik Corporation. And since then we have diversified so that we have a transmission pillar, a generation pillar and a services pillar under Nukik Corporation, which allows us to look at the full integrated resource planning really for the region, and also be able to serve other corporations, for example, who intend to develop projects in the Arctic and need the expertise, need the knowledge base on caribou, on, energy, power systems and all of that expertise that rests with Nukik can be shared with others as well.

00:04:35 - 00:05:30

Lance Mortlock

So that kind of leads me a little bit deeper in terms of the Kivalliq Hydro-Fibre-optic Link project commonly referred to, I think as KHFL. So this project combines clean power transmission, digital connectivity. From your perspective, what makes this project, I guess, nationally significant beyond the regional impact for Nunavut and Manitoba? Because there’s a lot of talk in the country right now about nation-building and sovereignty.

And, we need to invest more in the Arctic. And, there’s this massive coastline that’s largely unprotected and there’s a lot of anxiety in Canada right now. And I think a lot of momentum about, nation- building projects, so to speak. So can you unpack that a little bit.

00:05:31 - 00:10:58

Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin

So, to unpack that I really need to give some context. And so the first piece of context I’ll give you and the listeners here is really to understand that when you think about Nunavut, yes, it’s part of Canada, but it’s really just part of Canada, on the map. When you look at the services, the level of access to infrastructure, the level of investment that Nunavut has gotten and still is getting compared to other jurisdictions, it’s not part of Canada. It’s third world country. It really has been treated as an afterthought at best and put into the “forget box” for a long, long time. So we’re dealing with that for territory that is the newest jurisdiction in Canada, right, it’s been created only 25 some years ago. And the second thing to understand is because it hasn’t been valued by different federal governments over time and invested in, you have to deal with the crippling lack of infrastructure.

And the first thing that newcomers to Nunavut tell me when they step out of that plane for the first time is, wow, it feels like I’m on a different planet. And not for good reasons, right? Because it feels like housing is falling apart, roads are falling apart, airports are not invested in. The energy is all 100% powered by diesel.

So everything that powers everyday life in Nunavut, not just in Kivalliq region, is powered by diesel. And 100% of all that diesel is imported from foreign nations. So it’s not even Canadian diesel that we burn in the Arctic. And then connectivity supported by low-orbiting satellites, which is spotty at best. It’s been better with Starlink over the past few years.

It allows business to really step into a bit more of modern times. You know, 3-4 years ago, what we’re doing now would have been impossible, just to give you an idea, simply impossible. So that has allowed a degree of progress. But again, Starlink is not Canadian technology, right. So you get into issues of data sovereignty, digital communication, security, etc.

So when you look at the context, the fact that there’s no road connection, no bridge, no transmission line connecting Nunavut to the rest of the country, that despite Nunavut being 20% of Canada’s landmass, essentially it’s an island, right. It has to function like an island, but it’s not an island that is treated like a crown jewel with a lot of investment to protect it and nurture those resources.

It is an island that is being set aside and let to decay, quite frankly. And the other part of the context to give to listeners here is to say that in Nunavut, there’s about 40,000 people. That’s generally the population. So we understand as project proponents that for projects that cost $500 million, $1 billion, $2 billion, the sheer economics of those projects cannot be understood as a project in downtown Toronto or in Ottawa or in Vancouver, where you have the critical mass of, that economic per-capita base that is going to justify large investments like that.

So I think it’s very important to understand that anything that’s going to happen in the Arctic, to a degree, needs to be perceived as a bit of public infrastructure, because arguably the building of the nation is incomplete. It’s completely not on par with the rest of Canada. And as much as we talk about nation-building projects, we haven’t even scratched the surface of what needs to be done in the Nunavut Arctic.

So to answer your question more directly, why is this project nation building? Well, it solves the issue of diesel dependency because the Kivalliq Hydro-Fibre Link will be rated at 150 megawatt capacity. It’s going to serve almost the entirety of the region. So it’s not one project for one community, it’s one project for almost one third of Nunavut and going to take those communities essentially off diesel, with diesel generators only serving for backup.

So for safety, because we’re still in the Arctic, right, where temperatures can be -60C and below and then it’s digital security. So when you talk about nation-building and wanting to bring Canada out and the territories within the societal and economic makeup of the nation, you need projects like that because it’s not solid farms or wind turbines that are going to really help with energy reliance in the Arctic.

You need base load power and so your options already are limited. And then you have to consider the cost, you have to consider the social acceptability, how advanced some analysis are versus other options and just the sheer realization and materialization of some of those aspirations. So because it’s multi-purpose digital connectivity and power, it really fits that narrative of nation-building.

Yet I’m sure we’ll get into it, but it’s not that easy to get it recognized as nation-building.

00:10:59 - 00:11:45

Lance Mortlock

For sure. Pivoting a little bit, energy transition discussions often, I think, focus on power generation, but the supporting infrastructure is just as critical. How does your project change the long-term energy and emissions profile of northern communities and how does it affect maybe the quality of life in the northern regions? I mean, you talked about diesel power. So yes, I’m assuming based on what you’ve said earlier, it plays a role in sort of replacing that, that becomes more of a backup.

So there’s an impact there. Any other impacts that you want to kind of address and then interested in kind of the quality-of-life piece as well?

00:11:46 - 00:14:30

Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin

Yeah. So we have all those numbers, as you can imagine, for a project that’s been studying its development and implementation for a number of years. So in terms of diesel displacement, it’s massive. It’s more than 130 million litres of diesel fuel a year that would be displaced as a result of the KHFL. In terms of greenhouse gas emission, it’s just about 400,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions that won’t go into the air because and thanks to the project. Then it’s telehealth, then it’s remote education.

It’s all things that very reliable digital connectivity can offer to the folks here who don’t have access to that now. So any medical uncertainty right now is treated by a medical evacuation. And that medical evacuation has to happen in the Kivalliq region to Winnipeg. So you can imagine just the sheer cost of that. If you had access to reliable online imagery and consultations and supported by, again, domestic infrastructure, that would relieve a lot of that cost pressure.

Same thing for education. We’re heading towards having the first Inuit Nunangat University that’s going to be based in Arviat, which is huge news and very positive development. That university can be powered by clean electricity coming from Manitoba and can also have access to fibre-optics thanks to the KHFL. So when you think about the KHFL and quality of life and all the environmental and socioeconomic attributes, the list really goes on and on because it’s so transformational.

And there’s a reason why in the world there’s no thriving society that functions 100% on diesel with no connectivity. It just doesn’t exist. So the economic prosperity aspect is a main driver for this project. And I always say that the project is not an energy project. It’s an infrastructure project first and foremost. And even though it’s a transmission project and not a generation project, as you well know, once you have the backbone that transmission infrastructure provides, then it attracts and it bolsters the case of local generation, because if you have surplus electricity, guess what? You can send it back onto the grid. So as much as electrons would flow south-north at first Manitoba-Nunavut, if Nunavut is to develop hydropower resources onshore, offshore wind which, by the way, we have the best wind resources in the whole of North America on that west coast of the Hudson Bay, excess power can be shared back onto the grid.

00:14:31 - 00:15:23

Lance Mortlock

I think most people just don’t realize these things. I think a lot of Canadians sort of go through life not understanding the hardship in these northern communities and the realities day to day. And it really makes me think how a project like this is just so game changing. I guess from a development standpoint, large linear infrastructure projects in, I’ve experienced it with pipelines, in Western Canada often face regulatory financing and execution challenges.

What have been some of the most complex hurdles to advancing the KHFL project and how has your organization approached those?

00:15:24 - 00:19:55

Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin

Yeah. So look the main challenge is financing. We have enough of a good understanding of our social licence because we’ve done more than five years of community engagement. Every year we do two campaigns. We go to all the Kivalliq communities. We have letters of support from hunters, trappers organizations from mayors, mayors in council. Also all the mayors of the Kivalliq region are in support of the project.

So that part I don’t want to brush it off saying it’s going to be easy because you really have to honour that social licence and nurture it as you develop your project. But we have a good understanding of what we need to do. In terms of constructability, we have good partners. We have a lot more engineering to do, but that transmission line, at the end of the day, it’s a proven concept first of all in terms of the technology and there are Arctic nations, we have to remember that even though Canada has never built a transmission line of this kind in the Arctic, other Arctic nations such as Norway, Finland, Russia, they’ve built those and by the way, way past the Arctic Circle, which is even more north than the KHFL. And they’ve done so in the ’70s and ’80s, because let’s remember that the very first transmission line in North America was commissioned in the late 1800s.

So you’re dealing with a technology that has such a proof of concept, that has such a degree of expertise, engineering-wise and, people-wise, that you’re not trying to reinvent the wheel here. The only thing you have to really understand is the land you’re going to be building this on. So permafrost, for sure is a critical environmental challenge.

But again, good understanding because others have built on permafrost. Caribou and other environmental matters are going to be at the forefront. But financing, to go back to my main point, is the number-one hurdle. It is the number-one challenge because of what I said earlier, which is that the economics of the project, so we’re talking about a $3 billion capital cost project for in the Kivalliq region, there’s just under 20,000 people, about 16,000. If you do the sheer math on that right, it doesn’t add up. So the project needs to be understood from a cost-benefit analysis. So the cost of inaction, it has a real cost, the fact that most of the out-of-life expectancy acceptability are in the Kivalliq region. So we have at least three diesel plants in the Kivalliq region as we speak that are past their safety life acceptability, so they need to be replaced. And the territorial utility, Qulliq Energy Corporation is dealing with that dilemma of looking at major capital reinvestment in those assets while trying to manage an energy transition that needs to happen because diesel is so volatile. And also, as I said, it’s not national diesel that we import, so who knows where the US, how it’s going to view its Canadian-US relationship in the next few years.

And most of the diesel we import comes from the US. So you have all of those dynamics that we have to contend with and that are very challenging as a project proponent, because nobody questions the “why” on the project. Right. Like it’s such a no brainer that a project like this would be night and day. It would be transformational and in many ways it should have happened a long time ago. But the next thing that people say is I wish somebody else pays for it, right. I wish, somebody raises their hand and helps you on that because it is a big undertaking. And for the federal government in particular, because of what I said earlier, that it needs to be understood as a bit of a public infrastructure project, there’s no program. Despite all of the announcements on the Arctic and Arctic infrastructure and all the attention on Arctic sovereignty, there’s no program that can propel a project of this scale forward. So we have to be creative thinkers, and we have to think outside the box, which is not what the federal government is known for.

00:19:56 - 00:20:01

Lance Mortlock

Where is the money primarily expected to come from the federal government?

00:20:02 - 00:22:57

Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin

The money will come from a number of sources. So in terms of the funding stack, we’re talking Inuit equity will play a large role because we want to maintain Inuit ownership. The Canada Infrastructure Bank has been a partner on the project for a number of years. We’re also and we’ve raised senior debt from capital markets to de-risk the project.

And finally, it’s the federal government, and the federal government who will have to play a very significant role in this project. But what I will say, Lance, is that it’s not expected to be a grant. Right. Like for those projects, there still has to be an economic value for the federal government. But it’s exactly how we construct the economics, so that are we talking about issuing green bonds into the market that investors can buy into and that, creates an economic case that self propels almost the project? Are we talking about forward capacity buying. Right. These things have been done in other jurisdictions, but they’ve been done in jurisdictions where you had most likely a pretty significant rate base.

Right. So the de-risking at the rate base level was significant in again in Toronto or even in smaller jurisdictions like Nova Scotia. We’re seeing those deals happen between Québec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, etc. for interties. And that’s because there’s a significant de-risking that can be done just on the back-of-the-envelope math, that the federal government is like, okay, well, there are enough people here that this project cannot go sideways. In the Arctic, it’s harder to understand it that way just because there aren’t that many people. And so you really have to, as you look at the backstop that is required by the federal government, I go back to my creative thinking. We really have to think of it as public infrastructure that can just generate so much socioeconomic benefits that we need to be able to quantify those and we need to have the full value proposition that makes it economic.

And it’s not novel, by the way. The World Bank functions like this for financing some international projects. It’s just, I think the mental block is that it’s never been done in the Arctic. And so the magnitude of the project is significant. And on top of that, it’s in a jurisdiction that is the youngest in Canada, still finding its own footing in terms of governance.

And, large infrastructure hasn’t been built in the Nunavut Arctic. So people are sometimes a bit lukewarm about stepping into or jumping into the deep end of the pool.

00:22:58 - 00:23:35

Lance Mortlock

I mean, is there an opportunity with the transmission line and the fibre optic cable to combine that with other infrastructure in the future, like a port, for example, or a military base or something else that again, going back to the importance of sovereignty, our northern border, these kinds of things, is that a consideration that this is the beginning of infrastructure that allows and creates a footprint for other things that likely need to be done in the future?

00:23:36 - 00:25:31

Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin

Yeah. And you’re entirely correct. And the linchpin of the project is, well, there are several, but one of them is mining. There is a lot of mining happening in the Kivalliq region, more will likely happen in the future. It’s gold mining, in particular. Agnico Eagle mines, Canada’s largest gold miner, has been active in the Kivalliq region for more than a decade.

They have two active mines right now, one near Baker Lake, Meadowbank that’s going to set to close in 2030. And then Meliadine near Rankin Inlet, where I’m based, which is set to close around 2036 at the moment. So our business case is underpinned by selling power to residents, to customers, to governments, to businesses and to the industrial sector.

Now, the more industrial customers that come in the Kivalliq, the better our business case becomes. It’s an easy statement to make. Industrial customers could be mining, could be data centres, could be, universities could be housing factory, modular housing factory. All of the above is happening, by the way. So mining is at its constant exploration in the region.

There are some junior mining plays that are being made in the region, critical minerals in abundance in the ground. So we know that the region, even though there’s a critical lack of infrastructure, the geology is world class in that pocket of the world and in that pocket of Nunavut. The thing that’s keeping it all from happening is really that lack of infrastructure, because when you talk about gold, you can deal with the lack of infrastructure because you have minimal processing, right. And then shipping it out can be done on the plane. When you talk about iron, when you talk about.

00:25:32 - 00:25:34

Lance Mortlock

The quantities are different. Yeah.

00:25:35 - 00:26:28

Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin

Even precious metals like rare earth and everything and all the processing, the smeltering, just ain’t going to happen without a transmission line, because the amount of diesel that you would need to burn to have a smelting facility, it would just blow the economics of anything that could happen here. So my point being, it’s a case of “build it and they will come.” Because the day you send that message to industrial investors that you have a connectivity that is baseload, non-emitting electricity that goes into the far Arctic, everybody’s going to rally around the next round of opportunities and you’re going to see a boom in exploration, a boom in early investment for lining up for operations because there is just that much to be done in that region.

00:26:29 - 00:26:43

Lance Mortlock

And it has the knock-on effect. I think of and maybe you could comment on this, in terms of employment and prosperity and economic participation in the region, lots of opportunity there as well.

00:26:44 - 00:29:27

Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin

Yeah. And that’s why, people like myself who continue to fight for a project like the KHFL, because I’ll tell you, it’s not rosy every day. It’s hard. You have to be very persistent and you have to have a lot of grit to get those projects through to the finish line. And they’re not done in a year as well.

So you also have to understand them long term. But you do it for the kids that you see running around, which Nunavut has one of the fastest-growing population in Canada. So what’s the plan for those kids? What is the plan for the next generation if mining goes away, if large industrial players cannot be attracted to the region, the Nunavut goes into oblivion.

That is the bottom line. 75% of Nunavut’s GDP comes from the mining sector. So that is, those numbers, again, are not well understood in Ottawa. They’re not well understood in the country. And Inuit leadership can only do so much in terms of moving those projects forward on their own shoulders. Right. Like the Kivalliq Hydro-Fibre Link is being developed. We don’t have private sector partners. We don’t have heavy lifting coming from other institutions that help us day to day.

We are the proponents. We do this work on our own. And so you know, at the end of the day, I think those projects really need to be accelerated and there should be a formula to be able to do so. And understanding that it has such a beneficial impact on employment long term, because you can as soon as you have an asset like this, that is a 50-, 60-,70-year asset, well, you can start actually doing long-term economic plans.

You now have your economic regional economics in place. You can commit to long-term training. You can go to schools and talk to high school students and say, have you thought about a career in energy transition? Have you thought about a career in X, Y or Z? Which right now you can’t really have those conversations because it’s so uncertain.

And so it’s very ad hoc. Even myself, I can only hire people on a 2- or 3-year contract basis because I don’t know, from a pure existential standpoint, I don’t know if we’re still going to be breathing in a few years. That’s the reality of major project development. As much as they’re huge. You’re talking billions of dollars. You know, you’re rallying a lot of parties around the undertaking, the sheer reality of whether or not you’re still going to be in existence a year from now is very palpable. And it’s the number-one danger.

00:29:28 - 00:29:45

Lance Mortlock

The Major Projects Office that the federal government set up and the greater focus that the federal government have on infrastructure development, is that helping your cause and the cause of the project you’re trying to drive?

00:29:46 - 00:32:40

Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin

It hasn’t helped us. So that’s the view now you’re asking me, what are we, April 30th, 2026? It could change tomorrow. So what I’ll say is, when it was announced and when Bill C-5 came out, the wording around it and the aspirations around the bill made a lot of sense to us, made a lot of sense to me. Because it always felt as a large project, trying to move that boulder up a mountain, that we didn’t have a house, we didn’t have a place where you had that coordinated whole-of-government discussion happening.

And also the folks you were talking to just didn’t have the expertise, didn’t have the expertise Arctic-wise, didn’t have the expertise in terms of complicated infrastructure finance. And so you would do two steps forward and really three backwards at the next change of government, at the next reshuffle, or just you would stall because of the lack of understanding.

So we were very hopeful when the major MPO was announced and created also by the staff that’s been appointed, very knowledgeable folks. It hasn’t been helpful to us, I’m saying yet, because we haven’t been referred to it. And I’ll say it’s been a bit detrimental because by creating a special club where you’re housing those projects that have now the label of being nation-building, being in the national interest, it infers that any other project that doesn’t make it to being referred to the MPO is not in the national interest, is not nation-building and the federal government has not communicated anything on that.

They’ve kind of said not every single nation building project is going to be referred. We only referring projects that need a bit of help on the coordination, on the regulatory standpoint. So but I’m hearing this and then I’m hearing the contrary, which is the projects that we are referring are the elite of what we want to do and there are the top tier of the priorities for this federal government. And now we’re creating a sovereign fund so that we can crowd in capital to get those projects done. So it’s been detrimental from that perspective because as soon as a project gets referred to the MPO, especially other Nunavut projects, I can tell you that my phone rings off the hook and my inbox gets flooded with people saying, what does that mean for your project?

Because arguably you were the most advanced in the Nunavut Arctic and you’re still not referred. So it’s very hard from that perception perspective to kind of rein it back, and even for ourselves to keep the motivation to say, “what is happening here?”

00:32:41 - 00:32:45

Lance Mortlock

Have you actually applied or put your project forward to the IPO?

00:32:46 - 00:33:32

Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin

Oh yeah, I think we were the first ones as soon as they published Bill C-5 and started communicating on, if you remember originally they had those five criteria that sounded very objectively based. And so we meet and exceed all five criteria on Indigenous-owned, environmental benefits, national security, etc. So and that’s back almost a year ago. Right. Like that was last summer, we’re talking about Bill C-5. And that’s been within the federal system during all this time. And we’ve had one meeting with the MPO. And so I think I don’t want to be negative. It’s just the reality. Like you’re asking me about whether or not I find it helpful.

00:33:33 – 00:33:50

Lance Mortlock

Right. A defining feature of this project is the Indigenous leadership and ownership. Can you talk a little bit, maybe more broadly, why Indigenous-led infrastructure development is so important for successful nation-building projects in this country?

00:33:51 - 00:37:36

Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin

I think you won’t be able to build much without that, first comment. The reality is, treaty rights and other type of Indigenous involvement in the evolution of the Constitution of Canada is everywhere under different labels and under different matrix and so forth. What I know is the Arctic, so I’m going to speak about that. Right, It’s quite different in other parts of the country, but I think and I really feel it in my bones, even not being Inuk, I’m not from the Arctic, but I’m reading the history. I’m reading everything that’s been done. And I’m living that reality now that I live in Rankin Inlet and we’re heading into a wall, that is the reality.

And so Inuit leadership is exercising their right for self-determination, which is really what’s primarily driving this project. They have elected this project as what they want to see done for energy prosperity, for economic development and for digital sovereignty. And anyone else who’s a private sector proponent who tries to lead a project of this scale in the Arctic without Inuit leadership involved, and when I say involved means at least a certain degree of ownership stake, is not going to be successful, because they just won’t understand the reality. They won’t understand what’s driving the need for economic development, but also what is in very close relationship to that, is the protection of the land. Every decision we make at my board level is very actively looked in terms of the environmental impacts, in terms of the societal and social ramifications.

We don’t make any decisions lightly. And I’m not saying that private proponents who don’t, who are not from the Arctic would take those decisions lightly. But it’s almost a de facto thing that without that experience, which is lived experience, cultural experience, you don’t start from the same standpoint, and you don’t have the same knowledge that allows you to bring a successful project to the finish line.

And also, the last thing I will say is, projects that are Indigenous led, such as the KHFL and not just led, but 100%, Inuit owned in our case, understand that, time is almost irrelevant. And I don’t mean it in the sense that, we’re going to be patient forever and the project may happen in 2050 and that will be great.

We want it with a sense of urgency. But what I mean by that sense of patience is, once everybody’s on the same page, then we have a project, is really what Indigenous people, my understanding of the way they view development is very anchored in that sense of, it’s going to take the time it takes, but we want to do it right, because we want to make sure that people see the value, people are involved every step of the way. And so it’s drastically different from any other projects that is driven by schedule and those critical paths. So it’s a different dynamic. It’s a different approach. And I think, I mean, we’re all seeing it that Canada is going to be defined by Inuit and largely Indigenous infrastructure in the future.

00:37:37 - 00:38:07

Lance Mortlock

For sure. And, major projects, also, you know, there’s the ownership and the financial piece, but pivoting a little bit onto the specialized skills and capability. How is Nukik approaching the workforce recruitment and development and how do you ensure strong northern and Indigenous participation across the projects phases? You know, the skill and capability piece.

00:38:08 - 00:38:27

Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin

That is a hard one, right. The capacity building is a tough one because, a, the population is small and so you don’t have an infinite pool to train. And also, there’s a high competition for the people who are skilled and who have gone to university and who can work, especially in mining, in an industrial development, in infrastructure.

00:38:28 - 00:38:32

Lance Mortlock

Yeah, they can go anywhere else across the country and get great jobs.

00:38:33 - 00:40:39

Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin

And with mining, that well-paying jobs close to their communities. So what I’m not looking at, quite frankly, I’m not looking at folks who are in their 20s right now and looking at people who are in their teens and trying to think about how we onboard them in just knowing that these opportunities are coming and bring that awareness that they can make those choices of whether or not, as I was saying earlier, they want to work in the energy transition, they want to work on the infrastructure, they want to become linesmen. All of those jobs are going to be very well paying. They’re going to be lifelong opportunities. I go back to the sheer problem of committing, and it’s the same thing, for example, Inuit impact benefit agreements and other impact benefit agreements that we would have to sign in northern Manitoba for a project of this size.

You cannot open those discussions and commit to an employment and a local content strategy, or any kind of numbers until you know that the project is a go. And then once you have that certainty that the project is a go, it’s almost too late because it’s time to order material and it’s time to mobilize and it’s show time.

So we are going to have to deal with the sequence of events here. And before we get to financial investment decision, which we hope is going to happen before 2028, and be able to build that capacity and have those people trained so that we can hire them and keep them for many, many decades. It’s a constant, evolving, dynamic and moving target, something that we know is going to be extremely challenging.

And the other part of that is going to be local procurement as well. There’s going to be a huge opportunity for local businesses to thrive, to be created and to thrive. But again, it’s hard to give them exactly an idea of when we’re going to be a go and when they need to be setting up their services, until we have a clear idea of our path forward.

00:40:40 - 00:41:04

Lance Mortlock

Looking ahead, what lessons from the KHFL project should policymakers, investors and industry leaders take away when considering the future of the Arctic and nation-building infrastructure initiatives in that region?

What would you do different. If you were to do it over, what would you do different?

00:41:05 - 00:43:06

Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin

That’s an interesting question because we’re not at the end of the road. So really taking stock and saying what would we do different is a bit challenging. But I think one lesson I’ll just maybe piggyback on the first part of your question. One lesson, which resonates probably with a lot of other projects, is to recognize that when you need the federal involvement, meaning in your funding stack, when you need the federal involvement in a significant way, you’re going to need a federal champion, meaning you’re going to need to have a federal minister latched on and who’s going to be relentless and who’s going to push that agenda.

And I think as Inuit leadership stepped into this project 10 years ago, as I also took over 5 years ago and continued to move the project forward, there’s only so much you can do when you’re not a politician, but ultimately, the decision to forgo, no-go rests with politicians. And so one key lesson would be, the very first thing you need to invest your time and money in, is identifying that champion and trying to secure that champion, an ambassador of your efforts, who’s going to be, hopefully, there for a few years, who’s going to help bring that awareness and for that awareness not to come from a project proponent which is always viewed as, biased by nature. So it’s not something, it’s not to say that we haven’t done that, but I think we haven’t realized the critical importance of that until maybe later on in the game and thought that we could move mountains a bit on our own and really now realizing that, no, this is really going to be something that we need the cabinet to move forward.

And they are on other projects. So I do believe that they will come. But it continues to be a challenge.

00:43:07 - 00:43:15

Lance Mortlock

Yeah. Anything else, Anne-Raphaëlle, that you want to share with our listeners that you think is important?

00:43:16 - 00:43:21

Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin

I think we’ve covered a lot and I’ve probably spoken too much already.

00:43:22 - 00:44:19

Lance Mortlock

No, I could listen to you for a lot longer. And I mean, I guess to wrap up I would just say thank you. Thank you for the conversation. And I really appreciate the sense of purpose that you’re bringing to this. I mean, it strikes me that you’re in an incredibly difficult situation in terms of trying to get this project moving.

And I feel the purpose and the desire that you have to actually change the lives of many people in that region. And I really appreciate that. And I wish you a lot of success as you go forward. I think what you’re doing is important, it’s important to the region, it’s important to the country and we need to get behind projects like this, particularly given the dynamics that you explained.

So. thank you for everything that you do.

00:44:20 - 00:44:31

Anne-Raphaëlle Audouin

Thank you. Thanks very much. And hopefully we can have a follow up of that discussion in a few months. And then we’ll have more answers and even more positive news to share.

00:44:32 - 00:46:10

Lance Mortlock

For sure. So for our listeners, we encourage you to reflect on today’s discussion and share your thoughts with EY. You can reach out to EY via the attached contact details or join the conversation on social media. Finishing another great episode, I’d like to share a few final messages. One: the Arctic is critical to Canada’s future. Global focus is increasingly turning northward due to emerging resource and transportation opportunities, and Canada must strengthen its Arctic presence and lead projects that promote sustainable and resilient practices across various sectors.

Number two, nation-building projects begin with infrastructure. Infrastructure serves as the foundation for growth. Initiatives like the Kivalliq project illustrate how strategic infrastructure development can simultaneously drive reconciliation, economic progress and energy security. And we talked about some of the related projects like ports and others. And then finally, Indigenous leadership matters. National projects achieve greater success when Indigenous leadership and participation is prioritized. Indigenous knowledge and practices provide valuable insights for navigating regional complexities while creating meaningful economic opportunities.

So once again, thank you to our listeners for joining our podcast and we’ll see you on the next episode.