Northern Ontario lawmakers are pushing for urgent highway safety improvements on two of the region’s deadliest routes. A new bill, introduced June 4 at Queen’s Park, seeks to address long-standing safety issues on Highways 11 and 17.
Mushkegowuk-James Bay MPP Guy Bourgouin introduced the Northern Highway 11 and 17 Safety Act, 2025, with support from several Northern Ontario colleagues and community leaders.
“It’s about keeping people safe. It’s about making sure Ontarians get home alive,” said Bourgouin during the news conference. “Conditions have worsened. That’s why we’re back again, proposing concrete, common-sense solutions.”
The legislation would require daily staffing of truck inspection stations for at least 12 hours and increased OPP traffic enforcement. It also calls for truck drivers to be certified exclusively by ministry examiners and would return winter highway maintenance to direct government control rather than private contractors.
Nipigon Mayor Suzanne Kukko, whose community sits at what she calls “the crossroads of Canada,” shared personal stories of highway tragedies affecting her community.
“A week before she was to start, her partner died in a highway accident on his way to Nipigon to go to work,” Kukko recounted about a young intern whose fiancé had just secured employment in the town.
She also described a near head-on collision with a transport truck while traveling with her children. “This bill will prevent life-altering accidents. It will save lives,” she emphasized.
Thunder Bay-Superior North MPP Lise Vaugeois pointed to insufficient regulation of commercial trucking and problems with privatized winter maintenance as key contributors to dangerous conditions.
“Many new drivers are treated as indentured servants with little ability to demand driver and maintenance training,” Vaugeois explained.
She noted that even a recently built $30-million inspection station in Shuniah rarely operates at full capacity, allowing drivers to easily circumvent inspections.
The bill builds on years of advocacy efforts aimed at improving highway safety in Northern Ontario, including previous pushes for better winter maintenance and stricter driver training requirements.