Northern Transportation Company

Northern Transportation Company

Northern Transportation Company Limited (NTCL) is a marine transportation company in the Canadian and American Arctic owned by Norterra, a holding company jointly owned by the Inuvialuit of the Northwest Territories and the Inuit of Nunavut. While primarily a marine freight hauler on Canadian rivers, like the Mackenzie and the Hay and along the Arctic coast of Canada, they are also a petroleum wholesaler. Its head office is now in the town of Hay River, Northwest Territories. Today, it uses primarily tugs and barges.

The company was an outgrowth of the competition in the Yukon between the new Northern Trading Company and the entrenched Hudson's Bay Company. Colonel J.K. Cornwell, one of the principals of the Northern Trading Company, ran his first steamer, The Midnight Sun, on the Lesser Slave Lake River in 1904. The company acted as a kind of subsidiary of the Northern Trading Company until its formal creation in 1931 as Northern Waterways Limited, but its name was changed in 1934 to the Northern Transportation Company Limited. It was one of the first haulers on the Mackenzie River after the Hudson's Bay Company, starting up just after the Yukon gold rush. In 1937, it was taken over by the El Dorado Gold Mining Company and Arthur Berry was appointed manager in Edmonton. In 1944, it became a Crown corporation when its parent, then known as Eldorado Mining and Refining, was nationalized by the government of Canada.

The company has been involved in North Slope operations since 1963. In 1975, then under the jurisdiction of the Coast Guard Northern Division of Transport Canada, it became the sole marine shipper in the Canadian Arctic operating of out of Churchill, Manitoba. In 1959, it moved its operational headquarters to the town of Hay River. In 1985 it was purchased by the Inuvialuit Development Corporation and Nunasi Corporation, two native-owned corporations.