Hay River Mayor Kandis Jameson says federal Arctic defence spending will not fix local problems unless Ottawa first addresses chronic shortages in staffing, housing, and technical support in northern communities. Jameson, who sits on the Northern and Remote Communities Committee of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, said major federal investments cannot be delivered without local capacity to manage them.
Jameson pointed to the brief construction season that limits every project in the North. “If you’re lucky in the north, you have a four-month window to get some of these projects completed,” she said. The mayor’s comments follow Prime Minister Mark Carney’s March 2026 announcement of $35 billion in Arctic defence spending, largely focused on expanding forward operating locations in Yellowknife, Inuvik, Iqaluit, and Goose Bay.
Hay River has already faced harsh consequences of thin local capacity. In 2022 a record flood caused $175 million in damages, and the following year the town was evacuated twice for wildfires. “When you see what we’ve seen – specifically in Hay River or Tuk – I mean there are so many things we can point to with climate change,” Jameson said. “You know I had a major flood, something we’ve never seen, and then 12 months later we’re evacuating again for a fire.”
The FCM report backs up the mayor’s concerns with territory-wide data. Building housing in the North now costs nearly four times more than elsewhere in Canada, while Yellowknife’s homelessness rate sits at 1.5 per cent – twice Vancouver’s and six times Toronto’s. Jameson argues none of those problems can be solved separately. “We just want to be at the table, we want to be talking,” she said. “We want to tackle this with a more holistic approach, because everything is interconnected.”
