Ontario Premier Doug Ford attends an announcement about the Ring of Fire at the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada convention in Toronto on March 2.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Adam Kirkwood is a peatland conservation scientist at Wildlife Conservation Society Canada.
In March, the Ontario government announced a plan to complete roads to the Ring of Fire five years ahead of schedule, meant to expedite access to the region’s critical minerals deposits. After decades of promises about development in the province’s Far North, the announcement raises expectations. But it also raises a more difficult question: whether the province is accelerating delivery or accelerating risk.
The feasibility of the road is not just a matter of how quickly it can be built, but where it would be built. Large portions of the proposed route cross the Hudson Bay Lowlands, the second-largest peatland complex on the planet, storing 30 billion metric tonnes of carbon – millions of which are along the proposed road corridor. Construction and operation of the road would disturb these peatlands, and risk the release of stored carbon as greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane.
Ontario is no stranger to building roads, but building on peatlands poses engineering challenges. Peatlands are water-rich ecosystems composed of partially decayed vegetation called peat. The peat is several metres thick, creating unstable ground conditions that complicate road building and long-term maintenance.
Ontario says it will complete construction on roads to the Ring of Fire by 2031
Within these compressed timelines, the design phase significantly overlaps with early construction across the three proposed connected roads: Marten Falls Community Access Road, Northern Road Link and Webequie Supply Road. This approach may shorten project schedules, but it also means critical engineering decisions may be finalized after construction has already begun. In landscapes as complex as the Lowlands’ peatlands, this increases the risk of costly redesigns and unforeseen environmental impacts.
Peat doesn’t make for a sturdy road foundation, leaving builders the choice to bypass peatlands, remove the peat or build on top of it.
Bypassing the landscape in this region is not possible, as 90 per cent of the Lowlands are covered by peatlands. Environmental assessment reports indicate that excavating the peat is technically and economically infeasible due to depths often exceeding two metres.
This leaves only two viable engineering options: compress the peat with large volumes of aggregate fill, such as gravel; or use geotextiles or geogrids, which are strong synthetic fabrics that increase the strength of peat as a foundation and produce a “floating road,” reducing the amount of fill required. Given the limited areas available for aggregate extraction along the proposed corridors, the floating road approach is likely the more practical option. But it introduces a different set of risks.
A road of this scale has no precedent in Canadian peatlands, with only limited experience from smaller resource roads in northern Alberta.
The dozens of environmental assessment and impact statement documents associated with the Ring of Fire project rely on the floating road technique to address the technical challenges of building roads on peatlands. However, they provide little evidence of technical feasibility, with no clear examples of long-term success, fewer maintenance requirements or costs, or reduced impacts to the ecosystem in comparison to traditional road designs.
Peat soils can consist of up to 90 per cent water, and do not behave like solid ground. When heavy materials such as aggregate are placed on top, the peat compresses and loses volume – a process engineers call “settlement.” This means that during and after construction, the road gradually sinks deeper into the peatland. Settlement exceeding 50 per cent of the peat depth has been observed elsewhere; this is substantial given that peat deposits along the road corridor can reach five metres in depth.
There is also little evidence that the hydrological effects of a floating road have been adequately considered. While in theory, floating roads are meant to allow the flow of water beneath the road, evidence from Alberta resource roads built on peatlands shows that these roads still create significant barriers to natural water movement. As upstream sides of the road get wet from the water movement that it is blocking, peatlands produce more methane, a potent greenhouse gas. As the downstream side of the road gets drier from receiving less water, the peatland produces more carbon dioxide and also becomes more susceptible to fire.
This in turn affects the carbon balance of a globally important peatland and hinders Canada’s progress on mitigating climate change. Roads may flood, erode or even wash out – creating expensive and unanticipated maintenance and repair costs.
Rushing the design and construction of an unprecedented road through sensitive landscapes carries real risk of causing irreversible damage to ecosystems – on top of financial concerns. Problems that careful planning could address will instead be discovered after the fact, at far greater cost.
We can’t afford to build this road by trial and error – shortcuts today will cause financial and ecological liabilities tomorrow.