The renewed push to improve Highways 11 and 17 is gaining momentum across Northern Ontario, but for many people in the Kenora region, the issue has never really gone away.
For years, municipal leaders, residents and industry groups have warned about the dangers posed by long stretches of two-lane highway, heavy commercial traffic, harsh winter driving conditions and frequent closures along Northwestern Ontario’s section of the Trans-Canada Highway. Now, a growing coalition of northern municipalities and transportation advocates believes the issue is finally beginning to attract meaningful attention from both Queen’s Park and Ottawa.
That renewed pressure was formalized last week through a joint announcement involving the Northwestern Ontario Municipal Association (NOMA), the Federation of Northern Ontario Municipalities (FONOM) and the Ontario Trucking Association, all calling for accelerated investment in Highways 11 and 17.
For NOMA president and Marathon Mayor Rick Dumas, the Kenora corridor remains one of the most critical sections of the conversation.
“I represent Kenora in your area as NOMA president,” Dumas explained in an interview with Miner & News.
“We’ve made it very clear to the government that once the ball starts rolling, and even before the ball starts rolling with the commitment from both levels that we get that funding, we want to have a sit-down and talk about the most critical links.”
Dumas acknowledged traffic volumes vary across Northern Ontario, but said the stretch west of Nipigon, through Kenora toward Manitoba, continues to stand out as a major pressure point.
“The highway corridor through that area is wicked. We all know that,” he said.
“So, let’s focus on the critical.”
The renewed advocacy effort comes after another winter marked by numerous highway closures across Northern Ontario. According to Dumas, nearly 700 closures occurred this past winter along the roughly 3,000-kilometre corridor stretching through Northern Ontario.
Those closures were caused by a combination of collisions, spun-out transports, severe weather and unsafe road conditions.
“If there’s a snowstorm in our part of the world, the highways are closed,” Dumas said.
“If a transport jackknifes on a hill, the highway can be closed for 4 hours just to clear that one vehicle.”
The issue has increasingly become a regional political priority.
In recent weeks, Ontario Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria described highway safety in the north as a “top priority” for the provincial government, pointing to investments in truck parking, passing lanes and commercial inspection infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Timiskaming-Cochrane MPP John Vanthof successfully pushed a motion through the Ontario legislature asking the province to formally recognize improvements to Highways 11 and 17 as a project of national interest.
Kenora-Kiiwetinoong MP Eric Melillo has also continued to press Ottawa to become more directly involved in highway expansion discussions, arguing that the route is both an economic and a national sovereignty concern.
Dumas believes that growing political alignment is significant.
“We thought, with the most recent bad winters in the last couple of years, the amount of highway closures, let’s get together, let’s push this issue back to the province, how important our highway corridor systems are,” he said.
Dumas said the advocacy effort is now moving beyond Queen’s Park, with municipal leaders actively seeking meetings with Prime Minister Mark Carney and several senior federal ministers to frame Highway 11 and 17 improvements as a national infrastructure and economic security priority.
Part of that momentum stems from a Northern Ontario transportation task force established by the province in 2022. Dumas said the resulting report included more than 60 recommendations to improve highway safety and reliability.
Those recommendations included both long-term infrastructure planning and shorter-term safety improvements.
While twinning portions of the highway remains a long-term objective, Dumas said Northern leaders are also advocating for expanded use of “2+1” highway designs in certain sections. The model uses alternating passing lanes separated by barriers, allowing safer opportunities for motorists to pass slower traffic.
“So the 2 plus 1 system is simply two lanes, five-to-10-kilometre stretches,” Dumas explained.
“We have a barrier in between the sections you can’t pass. You can only pass when you have your allowable section, whether it’s the five-or-10-kilometre distance, and it really saved a lot of lives.”
He stressed that no single solution would work across every section of Northern Ontario’s highway system, particularly given the geography, traffic patterns and engineering challenges involved.
“That’s where the smart people come to play, the engineers, designers,” he said.
“Then those individual engineers and designers can go back and say, ‘Yeah, critical here, critical here, critical here, let’s start working on these and then bring it all together.’”
Still, Dumas repeatedly emphasized that municipalities are not asking governments to solve the entire issue overnight.
“It’s going to take a decade or two, we know that,” he said.
“But if you start with a plan and you commit to the funding of the plan, and you have specific areas of local knowledge about highway safety and the corridors that prevent deaths and fatalities on our highways, but also move the goods and commercial products throughout, that’s what we want.”
Much of the current lobbying effort is also focused on reframing Highways 11 and 17 as infrastructure of national significance, rather than simply provincial roadways.
That argument has become increasingly tied to national supply chains, critical mineral development and even defence infrastructure.
Dumas pointed repeatedly to the vulnerability exposed during the 2016 Nipigon River Bridge failure, when a structural problem temporarily severed the Trans-Canada Highway.
“Literally, Canada was cut in half for 18 hours,” he said.
“If you do not go over the Nipigon River Bridge to pass through Canada, you do not get through Canada.”
At the time, traffic was forced to reroute around the Great Lakes in the United States.
Dumas believes that the incident fundamentally demonstrated how dependent Canada remains on Northern Ontario’s highway corridor.
“With the way the world is today, it doesn’t take much for somebody to do some radical stuff and make a threat or do the threat and blow that bridge up,” he said.
“And I’m saying this factually, this is the way our world is today.”
That vulnerability, he argued, is one reason municipal leaders are now trying to connect highway improvements to the federal government’s broader discussions around defence spending and nation-building infrastructure.
“We heard from Prime Minister Carney clearly, we need to find nation-building projects,” Dumas said.
“Well, here you have a project that can put tens of thousands of people to work. You’re spending our money, Canadian money, back on our highways to make them safer and more productive.”
The Ontario Trucking Association’s involvement has further strengthened the economic argument.
Commercial traffic volumes through Northwestern Ontario have increased substantially over the past decade, driven not only by industrial development, but also by the explosion of online commerce.
“Everybody now, and I’m telling you, everybody, I see, there’s parcels on their doorstep from somewhere,” Dumas said.
“So those parcels are getting to their communities by a commercial vehicle.”
That increase in freight traffic has created additional strain on highways that were never originally designed for current traffic volumes, particularly during winter storms.
At the same time, Dumas pushed back against broad criticism directed toward truck drivers themselves, noting many in the industry are also advocating for safer highways and stronger national training standards.
“People are driving trucks for a living,” he said.
“Are there some bad apples on the highways? Absolutely. There are some training issues that need to be addressed.”
In the short term, Dumas said municipalities continue to push for practical safety improvements that could be implemented more quickly than major reconstruction projects.
Those include increased winter maintenance, more patrols, additional truck pull-offs, improved signage and expanded rest infrastructure for commercial drivers.
“Simple little wins,” as Dumas described them.
He pointed specifically to the need for more heated roadside pull-off areas where fatigued drivers can safely stop during dangerous weather conditions.
“In Southern Ontario, you’ve got the population, they have En Route systems that are big facilities,” he said.
“But in our area, you don’t get that because we don’t have the people. We have traffic, but we don’t have the people.”
He also highlighted the enormous logistical challenge facing snowplow operators responsible for maintaining hundreds of kilometres of highway during major storms.
“The reality is we live in a big geographic area,” Dumas said.
“If I’m driving to Thunder Bay and I see a plow, that plow’s going to travel 60 kilometres to get to its turnaround point, then it’s got to travel back.”
For Dumas, one of the largest obstacles remains convincing decision-makers in Southern Ontario and Ottawa to fully grasp the realities of Northern transportation.
“People in Ottawa and people in Toronto don’t understand what’s happening in Northern Ontario,” he said.
“And that’s not a criticism. That’s just reality.”
Still, municipal leaders say the current moment feels different than previous advocacy campaigns.
With provincial ministers now publicly discussing partnership opportunities with Ottawa, and both levels of government increasingly focused on economic security and internal trade corridors, Northern municipalities believe the conditions may finally exist for a greater commitment to improvements to Highway 11 and 17.
Whether that ultimately results in widespread twinning, expanded 2+1 corridors, or incremental safety upgrades remains unclear.
“This is the most critical link in Canada,” Dumas said. “We just need governments to come together and commit to it.”
By Pam Fedack, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Original Published on May 13, 2026 at 11:00
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