Home page

Text size

E-mail this page

HAY RIVER - Hay River residents might be forgiven for humming a bar or two of "Back in the High Life Again" or saying "told you so" over the sea change at Northern Transportation Company Ltd.

William Duffy, NTCL’s new president, restoring operations to Hay River is a real positive for the community. - NNSL file photo

An entirely new management team at NTCL earlier this year reversed the course set by their predecessors to shift the company’s base of operations for the Western Arctic from Hay River to Delta, B.C.

Although the company’s website still lists Delta as a supply base and shows the supply route around Alaska to Tuktoyaktuk, management scuttled the expensive strategy in March and then rehired two of the eight Hay River administrative staff fired by the former managers.

“This is a real positive for Hay River,” said William Duffy, NTCL’s new president.

Mayor Kelly Schofield agrees.

“It’s been a real boost for morale in Hay River,” Schofield said. “People were down, hanging on to their money, and everything froze here for a while.

"The company’s return has created a great feeling – a lot of local people have been hired back.”

Appointed last September to succeed David Foster as president of NTCL, Duffy moved quickly to cancel his predecessor’s plan to move the company’s western operating base to British Columbia’s lower mainland in the name of lower shipping rates.

“It wasn’t working out; there was no pricing advantage for NTCL customers,” Duffy said.

NTCL is a subsidiary of NorTerra, a holding company owned jointly by the Inuvialuit and the Inuit of Nunavut. It has played a key role in Northern development, and in 2009 marked its 75th anniversary. But in the last decade it lost key contracts to competitors.

Foster, who reportedly never liked Hay River, also shifted the company’s administrative headquarters to Edmonton and invested millions of dollars in a new 12,000-tonne barge and refurbishing the Nanabush, a tug with enough power to pull it.

In Foster’s plan, the tug and barge would operate in other parts of the world when the Arctic season ended. But the Nanbush needed more extensive repairs than first estimated, and NTCL was forced to find another vessel for the route.

Duffy said the return to Hay River has already increased cargo volume by 10 per cent over last year, adding 2,000 tonnes to the loads that will be barged to communities in the Western Arctic and along the Mackenzie River.

The shipyard in Hay River has also been busy with refits to NTCL equipment and a Canada Coast Guard vessel, Duffy said.

“Going forward, we expect to increase the workforce in the shipping terminal as cargo volume grows,” he said. “The Mackenzie Gas Project is still in sight and there are indications that it is increasingly viable -- if it goes ahead, a lot of the material will come through Hay River.”

We welcome your opinions. Click here to e-mail a letter to the editor.