Yes — and we don't have to guess what happens, because it has already happened across the North. Near Lac de Gras, the Ekati and Diavik diamond mines blocked caribou water crossings and land bridges "like a dam or a fence," and the Bathurst herd — watched closely by both harvesters and biologists — has collapsed by as much as 98 percent. When the Meadowbank mine road near Baker Lake was extended, caribou stalled at it and detoured around it. In Alaska, caribou near the Red Dog mine road took about a month to cross what should take a few days, and many thousands more died because the road blocked their way. The same thing is being watched for right now on the very winter road this project would connect to.The pattern is consistent everywhere it has been looked at, documented by both scientists and Indigenous knowledge holders: roads and traffic delay caribou, push them off their routes, and force people to travel farther to find them. For the Dolphin and Union herd, a delay on land is especially dangerous — it pushes the herd's spring sea-ice crossing later into the season, onto thinner, more rotten, or already-breaking ice, right when Kugluktuk families depend on caribou reaching the places we harvest. And the single most important harvesting area still in active use around Kugluktuk sits directly in the path of the proposed road.

No, because there is no route that avoids them. The Dolphin and Union herd's range runs hundreds of kilometres to the east and west of the proposed line. Pushing the road east would strike the Beverly, Bathurst, and Qamanirjuaq herds, already burdened by existing roads and mines. Pushing it west toward Kugluktuk would still cut through the heart of Dolphin and Union range and into Bluenose East and Bathurst range as well. You cannot build a road across western Nunavut without doing serious harm to caribou.And the route is only half of it. No matter where the road ends, ships would still cross Dolphin and Union Strait — the same sea ice the herd walks over twice a year — including in the shoulder season when icebreakers would be moving in and out of the port. The biggest danger doesn't change no matter where the port sits. Moving the line on a map does not solve the problem.

Yes. In 2007, close to a thousand Dolphin and Union caribou were stopped at the edge of an open-water channel a barge had cut and kept open. Almost none got across. Our harvesters have said the same thing for years: the sea ice is our highway, for people and for caribou — it's how we travel to hunt and to visit other communities — and breaking it open is dangerous for both. That is already why a Notice to Mariners asks ships in our waters to slow down and avoid cutting the ice in front of caribou or people.The company says its ships would run only in open water, outside the ice season. But freeze-up and break-up shift by weeks from one year to the next, and a longer shipping season means operating in exactly the window when the ice is least stable and the herd is making its most dangerous crossing. That promise has to be locked down and enforced before anyone relies on it — because promises like it have loosened at other Nunavut mines once a project was approved.On thinner ice and drowning: this is well established. The sea ice now forms up to eight to ten days later than it did in the early 1980s, and caribou fall through unstable ice during the fall crossing. Our harvesters see it directly: young bulls in particular are drowning trying to cross ice that is no longer safe when they need it. We know this land and this herd, and we know what thinning ice is doing to them.

We've heard that promise before, and Nunavut's own record shows how it goes. Every environmental assessment in the territory since 1999 has concluded that caribou impacts would be "not significant" — every single time, even for mines built right in calving and migration areas, and even as those herds were declining. Those conclusions rest on mitigation that nobody independently tests, on comparing a project's footprint to an entire herd's range so it looks tiny, and on using Inuit Knowledge selectively. We are watching the same thing happen here: the company's Impact Statement leaves out our peer-reviewed research and relies on a report that was never peer-reviewed.And once the mines are running, the promises loosen. At Meadowbank the company fought migration-season road closures for years, then tried to weaken them. On Baffin Island, shipping out of the Mary River mine has harmed narwhal and walrus while the company still calls the impact insignificant. Some measures do help — real, enforced traffic limits during migration, for example — but here those protections have only ever come from communities pushing hard, not from companies offering them. So when we hear "it can be handled," we ask the only questions that matter: handled how, by what specific rule, enforced by whom, and what happens if the company doesn't follow through? And no mitigation plan changes the basic fact: a road and port through caribou country pushes caribou away from where our families can reach them. That is a cost no promise erases.

There is real need for jobs and opportunity in our communities, and no one should pretend otherwise. But the benefits of this kind of project are consistently overstated, and most of the money flows to shareholders and outside companies, not to us. At comparable Nunavut mines, Inuit hold only a small share of the jobs and pay — concentrated in entry-level roles — and companies keep falling short of their own Inuit hiring commitments, partly because fly-in/fly-out work is hard on workers and families. Research on extraction shows its ripple effect on the local economy is small compared with sectors like arts and culture, tourism, and care work: the community carries the costs while the profits leave.And the road itself would not even connect to Kugluktuk — the benefit on offer is a longer barging season, the same longer shipping season that raises the icebreaking risk to caribou and to people traveling on the ice. These assessments never count the economy we already have: feeding our families with healthy country food, the health of being on the land, and the dignity of taking care of it. Weigh all of that against what a healthy herd is worth to us. That economy is real, it belongs to Inuit, and this project puts it at risk.

The Kugluktuk HTO is taking part in the NIRB review in good faith, and we expect our concerns and interests to be heard and addressed. We are putting our knowledge, our evidence, and our members' experience of this land onto the public record, and we intend to stay involved at every stage of the process. The review matters, and our participation in it matters — that is exactly why we are answering these questions carefully and standing behind them.These answers reflect the position of the Kugluktuk Hunters and Trappers Organization, alongside Inuit Knowledge, community experience, and published, peer-reviewed research, government status reports, and the public record on this project and on other Nunavut mines. We're glad to point anyone to the underlying sources — just ask.