Richard Gleeson
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Jan 09/02) - The most lasting benefit of a Mackenzie Valley pipeline -- if one is built -- may have nothing to do with oil or gas.

Cece Hodgson-McCauley: Sahtu has been waiting too long already for highway.

Many Northern leaders see the pipeline as a golden opportunity to seize a long-sought prize, a Mackenzie Valley Highway.

"This is an opportune time to do it," said Economic Development Minister Jim Antoine. "The mobilization costs would be lower, the equipment would be there. It's worth looking at."

Antoine suggested the highway may be something that could be considered as the oil and Mackenzie Delta producers group refine their project in preparation for the filing of applications.

Both Antoine and Transportation Minister Joe Handley cautioned that a pipeline is far from a done deal but said the project brings the territories closer to a road than ever before.

"This is a tremendous opportunity," said Handley. He said a road up the valley would reduce the cost of living in communities in the valley, form a northern loop with the Dempster Highway that would boost tourism, and spur non-renewable exploration in the Valley.

"We don't want to burden (the producers and aboriginal pipeline group) with the environmental assessment of a road either, and complicate or frustrate the pipeline process," Handley cautioned.

As wishful as the thinking about a road is among Northerners, it is not an issue of being considered by those hoping to build a pipeline.

"We're not in the road-building business," said Imperial Oil spokesperson Hart Searle. "That's not typically what we do. I have not heard any discussion about a road."

A pipeline industry insider said much of the shipment of materials for a Mackenzie Valley pipeline would be done by barge and winter road.

Searle said transportation needs will be determined during the development of a project description. It anticipates filing that document with regulators in the second half of 2003.

Not all Northerners are seeing the pipeline as the key to a road.

"I don't want to wait that long," said Cece Hodgson-McCauley. The Norman Wells resident and founding chief of the Inuvik Dene band has been lobbying Ottawa for a Mackenzie Valley highway for years.

"If (the oil and gas companies) want to pitch in, okay, but we're not waiting for them," Hodgson-McCauley said. "We've already waited too long."