It’s been 14 years in the making, and after funding negotiations, and promises the construction on a fully-twinned Trans-Canada Highway from Kenora to the Manitoba border is finally beginning and could be completed by 2025.

It was made official at the Ontario/Manitoba on November 19, 2021, by Minister of Transportation, Caroline Mulroney, and Greg Rickford, Minister of Indigenous Affairs, and Minister of Northern Development, Mines, Natural Resources, and Forestry.

“It’s 14 years in the making. Today the twinning is beginning, and what’s behind that line is an enormous amount of work, and good faith efforts by the communities that have come together to shore up the only section of Canada’s TransCanada highway that is not twinned,” said Minister Rickford.

“This project has been on the table for over a decade, but it’s our government under the leadership of Premier Ford that is finally getting construction started,” added Minister Mulroney.

Phase one will be the 6.5 kilometre stretch from the border to the junction of Highway 673 and the TransCanada and is set to begin this spring.

Prior to the official construction, start crews started preliminary steps such as the clearing portion in December to make work for the construction phase to begin next year.

Rickford confirmed late in 2021 that phase two of the project has been locked down.

Rickford says all three phases of the project could be wrapped up by 2025.

“I’m hopeful,” said Rickford. “I think we’re looking at the next couple of years, maybe as far our as four years, to twin it all the way out to Kenora. Some would say it’s a little more. It’s likely not less – it’s a fairly substantial legacy piece of work. I think we’ll see it sooner rather than later.”

When the original project was announced over a decade ago, the federal and provincial governments each set aside $50 million for the project. The funds were announced by former Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and Rickford – when he was a federal MP for the Kenora riding.

The initial $100 million announced in 2009 was spent on twinning a highway east of Thunder Bay in 2017 due to a lack of action on the local twinning project. The Ontario Conservatives later put funding back in for the project in their 2019 Spring Budget.

Rickford’s been involved in the project for over 14 years now, and the workload could only continue to increase. The Minister says Ontario is still discussing further twinning work into Manitoba, where the twinned highway would eventually switch back to a single-lane highway.

Shoal Lake #39, or Iskatewizaagegan #39 First Nation, along with the Four Winds Partnership of Washagamis Bay, Wauzhushk Onigum, Shoal Lake #40 and the Dalles, gave Ontario their conditional consent to start the twinning work in 2021, as long as Ontario honours their set of commitments.

Chiefs and councillors from the Four Winds signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the provincial government to move forward with the twinning work in February 2020, after forming the partnership in 2018.

While work on the first phase of the project is now expected to begin this Spring, the Four Winds partnership has yet to give consent to Phase 2 or Phase 3 of the twinning project. That work includes twinning between Highway 673 and Rush Bay Road, and between Rush Bay and Highway 17A.

Just down the road, another important piece of the twinning project has begun as road improvements of Highway 673 that is the lifeline to the Shoal Lake No. 39 community have been ongoing for a couple of months now.

The work will be done in three phases, and each phase will address a different section of the highway where both the horizontal and vertical alignments in those areas will be improved.

Phase one began just over two months ago and will realign a 2.2-kilometre section of the highway and is expected to be open to traffic in the spring of 2022.