NWT premier says infrastructure funding from Ottawa is inadequate, responsible for dangerous evacuation conditions

Open this photo in gallery:

Northwest Territories Premier Caroline Cochrane says the federal government has not provided adequate funding for infrastructure in the North, a failure she argues has been responsible for dangerous conditions during evacuations from the territory’s wildfires.

Ms. Cochrane took aim at Ottawa during a news conference on Friday. She had just toured an evacuation centre in Calgary where many residents of the territory are staying while the summer’s fires rage around their home communities.

Essential workers in one of those communities, the town of Hay River, were ordered to evacuate on Friday evening as firefighters were pulled from the area because of increasingly dangerous weather. At least one Canadian Armed Forces Hercules aircraft arrived to carry people to safety. The rest of the community’s residents were told to flee on Aug. 13, as flames threatened both highways out of town.

Ms. Cochrane said the territory has been treated like a “Third World country,” and that she is tired of pleading for federal support for basic infrastructure. She said officials in the Northwest Territories have been asking “for decades” for the same infrastructure, roads and communications people in the rest of Canada take for granted.

“Now, I’m angry,” Ms. Cochrane said.

The fires severed phone and internet connections in several communities in the territory, leading to days-long blackouts just as evacuation orders went into effect. Residents of Kakisa, for example, had to be notified by letter to evacuate because of the telecommunications failure, according to CBC News.

Ms. Cochrane said there are 22 communities in the territory with no permanent roads. She stressed that smoke from wildfires can prevent airplanes from landing. Other communities have only one or two roads going in and out.

She cited Hay River, which is located across Great Slave Lake from Yellowknife. Telecommunications in the town, with a population of just 3,500, went dark after fire damaged a nearby fibre-optic cable the day residents were ordered to evacuate.

“We had no redundancy. I couldn’t get a hold of people, couldn’t know if they were safe, if they were evacuated or not,” Ms. Cochrane said. “If this happens next year, is it my fault? Whose fault is it when we can’t get people out because we don’t have basic infrastructure?”

She said about 68 per cent of the territorial population has been evacuated, which includes some 20,000 people from the capital city of Yellowknife and roughly 3,500 from Hay River. Many of the evacuees have never left the North before and aren’t familiar with big cities, she said. But she added that kindness and support from Albertans is easing some of the evacuees’ anxieties.

“I am eternally grateful,” she said. “You’ve truly shown what it means to care for people.”

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who accompanied Ms. Cochrane at the evacuation centre, said more than 21,000 people from the Northwest Territories have sought refuge in Alberta over the past week. She said the province assisted in the evacuations of four hospitals and is now providing medical services related to acute care, continuing care, obstetrics and dialysis for a combined 108 patients. Eighty-five inmates were transferred to Alberta correctional facilities, she said.

It is not clear when evacuees will able to return home.

In an update Friday evening, the territorial fire service said winds had fanned flames to the point that they had overwhelmed firefighting efforts near Hay River, sending a kilometres-wide flame front toward the town. The fire was about 10 kilometres away, the service said, and the town had not yet been affected.

“It is possible the fire flanks away from town – but we are not taking any chances,” the service added.

The service said the nearby K’atl’odeeche First Nation was also threatened, as well as Highway 1, which leads to the Alberta boundary.

A wildfire that covers about 167,000 hectares of land was about 15 kilometres from the Yellowknife municipal boundary on Friday afternoon. In a different update, the fire service said significant fire activity was expected on Friday on the eastern perimeter of the fire, closest to Yellowknife, because of high temperatures, low moisture and heavy winds.