The southern half of the Grays Bay story. A proposed 400 km all-season road through the Slave Geological Province connecting the existing road network near Yellowknife to the Nunavut border, where it meets Grays Bay Road and completes Canada's first overland link to a deepwater Arctic port. $1–2 billion, referred to the Major Projects Office in March 2026 as part of Carney's Northern infrastructure package.
A 400 km all-season gravel road running roughly north-northeast from the end of the existing Tibbitt-to-Contwoyto winter road system into the central Slave Geological Province, then onward to the Nunavut border. The corridor opens year-round access to a string of advanced mineral exploration and development projects — copper, gold, zinc, and cobalt — that currently rely on a winter ice road that is shrinking by weeks each decade as the climate warms.
Federal positioning frames the corridor not just as a mineral access road but as the inland leg of a sovereignty corridor that ends at a deepwater Arctic port — the kind of infrastructure NATO partners have been quietly asking Canada to build for years.
The corridor crosses the territories of the Tłı̨chǫ Government, the Yellowknives Dene First Nation, and the Łutsel K'e Dene First Nation. All three have substantial governance capacity, settled or near-settled land claims, and existing development corporations. The partnership structure means equity stakes, employment guarantees, and procurement set-asides are negotiated up front — a model the Tłı̨chǫ in particular have used effectively on previous resource infrastructure.
Without this corridor, Grays Bay is a road to nowhere. Without Grays Bay, this corridor is just another mineral road. The two need to be evaluated together, and they almost certainly proceed together or not at all. That dual dependency is a risk, but it also concentrates federal political will: cancelling either project breaks both, which is why the Major Projects Office referral covered them as a package. Earlier-stage than Grays Bay (no equivalent of West Kitikmeot Resources Corp. yet), but the partnership structure with the three nations is well-defined.