9/17/2023 0 Comments 80 days north pole airship choices![]() ![]() The economic disparities in remote communities are growing wider. These unacceptable conditions all stem from a lack of reliable, affordable freight delivery throughout the year. Food insecurity, overcrowded housing and underlying health problems (e.g., diabetes, mold aliments, tuberculosis) made Indigenous populations extremely vulnerable during the pandemic. The pandemic has shone light on its consequences. Lack of reasonably-priced, year-round cargo transport leads to poor living conditions. The number of ports required in the Arctic is similarly unaffordable. ![]() Just to convert Ontario’s 3000 kilometres of ice roads to gravel would cost over $9 billion. On average, gravel road construction costs $3 million per kilometre in the Canadian Shield and the North. The challenges are costs and climate change. Remote communities that depend on seasonal ice roads for inland transport have over 50 percent unemployment, as do isolated communities on the coast that depend on annual sea lifts.Įnhancing northern transportation infrastructure is a stated goal of Transport 2030. Poverty begins where the all-weather roads end. ![]() The other 70 percent is an underserved frontier. About 30 percent of the landmass has low-cost access by all modes of transport and a highly developed economy. The Transport 2030 vision sets out five themes, each of which will be explored in turn.Įconomically, Canada is like two countries. On November 3, 2016, then Minister of Transport Marc Garneau presented Transportation 2030, his strategic plan for the future of transportation in Canada (Transport Canada 2016). With lower greenhouse gas emissions, attractive economics, year-round applicability, and much smaller footprint on the land than a connecting gravel road, airships are a solution to northern communities and mines’ cargo needs whose time has come. This paper will examine the viability of cargo airships to address the northern transportation puzzle. Temporary winter roads are more dangerous, while melting permafrost threatens what little existing infrastructure has been built. No policy is not a policy, and climate change is making the status quo untenable. But despite the absence of any other ideas to improve transport accessibility for the North, the Government of Canada has ignored cargo airships as a possibility. Eighty-six years later, a new generation of cargo airships could fill an important gap in Canada’s national strategy for transportation. Eventually they were displaced with fixed-wing aircraft. As Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King observed in 1936, “if some countries have too much history, we have too much geography” (quoted in Ratcliffe 2016).Īirships – lighter-than-air aircraft that can navigate under their own power – were flying across the Atlantic Ocean when Mackenzie King made this statement, but various technical problems meant they never took off commercially. Transportation accessibility has been a chronic problem for northern Canada. There are 292 communities in Canada assessed as remote, meaning they are only accessible by air for most of the year, with alternative forms of transportation either non-existent, impossible or impractical. This has impeded the competitiveness of its resource sector and made the provision of basic public services, from health care and education to clean water and healthy food, a luxury rather than a right in the more remote regions. But the sparsity, vastness and extreme weather make much of the country difficult and expensive to access. Canada has enormous reserves of natural resources, and it is a homeland to Indigenous and northern communities that have developed unique cultures and traditions absent the homogenizing forces of southern cities. This is its strength as well as its weakness. Canada is a massive country, with its population mostly concentrated in a thin band near the 49th parallel. ![]()
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