Northern Ontario politicians are urgently appealing to the federal government for help during one of the deadliest winters on record along 2,000 kilometres of highway between Nipigon, Sudbury and North Bay.
In a letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney, the Northwestern Ontario Municipalities Association (NOMA) is urging the government to designate the stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway — both Highway 11 and Highway 17 — as dual-use national infrastructure.
That would tap into the federal government’s plan to spend more on defence-related infrastructure while fulfilling a years-old request from northwestern Ontarians to shore up the sole land connector between Eastern and Western Canada.
“We need to get the attention of the federal government to say: listen, we need you to invest,” said Rick Dumas, the mayor of Marathon, Ont., and president of the Northwestern Ontario Municipalities Association (NOMA).
Wonder if Ford taking money away from Northern Ontario roads to pay for the 401 expansion had any impact on this.
I lived in NWO for over 14 yrs and remember at one point the provincial gov’t promising to twin Hwy 11 and 17 in stages, by building passing lanes that would eventually merge together as a twinned hwy.
I don’t know for sure if Druggie diverted funds, but from his record I wouldn’t be surprised if he did.
Thanks for finding that.
In the three-month period leading up to Feb. 6, 2026, there were at least 148 hours of closures along highways 11 and 17 between Kenora and Sault Ste. Marie, forcing Canadian trade to either stop and wait or go through the U.S.
“We’re talking 400-, 500-, even an 800-kilometre detour,” Cirtwill said. “It’s not as simple as turning around and figuring out another way to go.”
Highway 11 closes because of low visibility due to blowing snow from high winds, ice accumulation, and snow falls that make it impossible for snow plows to keep up here.
Drivers are not prepared for it. All it takes is for a transport (or any vehicle) to get a little close to the ditch to get pulled in and stuck. Or a bit of ice to be in the other lane.
Vehicles go over train tracks and snow falls off them making it slushy and icy for the next vehicle. Creates lots of drag and pull. Often with ice. There is a corner after train tracks on hwy 11 where every year there is at least a few vehicle in the ditch.
Drivers are also not slowing down. They can’t see over 5 feet in front of them but still do 90kmh. Can’t even see oncoming traffic due to blowing snow.
The focus should not be over how long highways are shut down for, like what the article is saying, or finding detours. It should be on how to make roads safer. And unfortunately it would mean sometimes closing roads so people don’t die.
Put street lights to see through the blowing snow all up highways.
Get more snow plows. Salt and sand. But carefully. Salt doesn’t work at -30°C. Over sanding is just as slippery.
Also those detours are often on roads which aren’t closed but haven’t been plowed or maintained either.
Besides the obvious problem with building literally thousands of kilometres through remote areas and the impact to natural dark in the area, street lights don’t help with snow, or rain, or fog. It just adds to the glare.
NaCl road salt stops working at -10, not -30.
When I living in Kingston years ago they had started switching to liquid salt brine for the roads to help stop contaminating the marshes and lakes.
I dunno it they still do that tho.
Drivers are also not slowing down.
This is the real problem: not slowing down to match conditions (which can sometimes mean dragging along at residential-side-street speeds on the highway). That, and the weather events getting more violent. It used to be that 11 was hardly ever closed, but the number of vehicles in the ditch still seems to have been a lot lower. Of course, it’s possible that we just didn’t pay attention.
According to the Ontario Provincial Police, 10,661 collisions were reported on Highway 11 and 8,960 incidents on Highway 17 between 2020 and 2025.
In that period, 116 people died on Highway 11 and 123 on Highway 17, according to the OPP
It could be that now the highway closes to try to lower those numbers. Per article it says you’re 3 to 9x more likely to die on northern Ontario.
At least 11 deaths have been recorded on northern highways during the winter of 2026.
11 deaths this winter with all the closures we have had- That is wild.
I don’t think their solution of making another lane will fix this problem. If you’ve seen how plowing works here when there is 2 lanes in one direction, you’ll know only 1 gets cleared. Plows can’t keep up with a 2 lane Highway. A 3 lane Highway just means that one lane will get ignored till the snow storm stops.
My experiences are mainly from near the northeastern corner of 11 in the 1990s (and yeah, I drove through some bad shit a few times). Evidence of anyone plowing into the banks or through them into the ditch along that stretch was pretty rare back then. Of course, that area may not be representative even for that time period.
I suspect that one of the things that’s changed is training of transport truck drivers and enforcement of laws pertaining to transport trucks. Hell of a lot of those vehicles turn out to be overloaded or defective when they do run an enforcement blitz, and many of the drivers these days come from countries without significant snowfall and should be explicitly trained on how to handle our crappy weather before getting their licenses—but it isn’t a requirement, so they aren’t.
According to hearsay (as in, a friend with family in the area heard it from a local OPP officer) there’s a section of 17 out near the Sault which is closed much more often than it should be these days because the firm subcontracted to keep it clear just isn’t up to the work. Either that firm needs to be replaced by someone who can do the job, or that section of road needs to be improved even before we worry about three-laning anything. And I doubt it’s the only spot with those kinds of problems.
Three-laning the highways won’t help with weather-related issues, no. It may help with transport trucks trying to pass each other on inappropriate stretches of highway running people off the road, though, and similar. Widening 11 and 17 has been recommended in multiple government studies for decades.
A 3 lane Highway just means that one lane will get ignored till the snow storm stops.
Which is what happens in most provinces that have white outs. I recently took a trip back to Saskatoon just after the big storm that hit in Feb and it was brutal. Coming back was even worse as I hit a white out starting in Portage la Prairie. All we could do was turn on our hazard lights and hope for the best.
And only 1 lane each way on that fully-twinned highway was open.
