Bob McLeod calls for infrastructure investment to support mining sector

Northwest Territories Premier Bob McLeod is calling on Ottawa to direct some of its planned infrastructure spending to the North in order to boost the territory's mining sector.

Roughly 40 per cent of the territory's economy relies on mining, yet a lack of infrastructure in the region makes it tricky to service many of those operations, McLeod says.

"We have a very large infrastructure deficit," McLeod said Tuesday while in Toronto for the annual Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada conference.

"We don't have a lot of highways. A lot of our communities are only accessible by air or by boat in the summer time. We use a lot of ice roads in the winter time to haul equipment and resupply our communities, and obviously climate change is affecting our ability to make ice roads, and they're not open as long."

McLeod says he has been in contact with the federal government, and he's "very hopeful" that the federal budget, which will be released on March 22, will address some of his concerns.

However, he says it isn't only public infrastructure investment that's needed to support the territory's mining sector, which includes threediamond mines, two of which are operating,and a fourth under construction.

The premier says private investment is also needed, adding that three mining projects in the region that have already passed regulatory and environmental hurdles have failed to raise the capital needed to get off the ground.

While some investors may balk at the idea of pumping money into mining projects at a time of depressed commodity prices, McLeod says now is the perfect time to do so.

By the time mines are in production, commodity prices, which are cyclical in nature, may very well have risen.

Besides, the costs of building a project are much lower during times of economic downturn, McLeod says.

"When your economy is down, the costs of construction are a lot lower, the commodities that you have to buy are a lot cheaper, and there's a lot more skilled labour available," McLeod says.

"For us, it was a problem when the economy was booming. We had a hard time finding skilled workers who would come to the Northwest Territories."

The Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada conference wraps up today.