I can see why it's being taken care of. A town with Tide Water access on Canada's west coast could be very very valuable.
However, the col to access Kitsault from the BC central valley is still about half a mile high, so you would need to build a tunnel to get decent rail freight capacity. It would be a short one, easier than tunneling to Stewart/Hyder. Also, the inlet is only about 1800 feet wide, which could be difficult to navigate considering the high frequency of inclement weather in the area.
I wonder how much sea level rise or flooding it would take to inundate that rail line and the Yellowhead highway? They seem like they're barely above water level now.
Using Kisault as a port is an interesting idea. Worth mentioning that the tides in that area are huge, which makes for dangerous currents.
(Random personal trivia: I once passed within about 20 miles of Kisault while travelling to the Queen Charlotte islands by way of Prince Rupert. The 800 passenger ferry we took, The Queen of the North, some years later got off course on a different route and struck a rock at full speed and sank. Almost everyone got off.)
Rumour is that the acting Captain was getting his rocks off instead of doing his job of not crashing into rocks at full speed.
https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/captain-of-b-c-...
In the end there was no hard proof. Two people died, bodies never found. The officer was convicted with a four-year jail term (I’ve no idea how long he actually served.)
There is a railroad, but that is a windy, two-track railroad for the last ~200 kilometers from Kitwanga to Port Edward, with associated capacity limits and costs. To reach Kitsault from the relatively wide, flat Nisga'a Highway corridor, you need a tunnel of about 25 kilometers, but this could fit four or more tracks and run a much straighter, faster course. You can clearly see the difference:
I recall some company got in some controversy because during a public information session they had maps where they'd straight up removed many of the islands and shoals from the maps of the inlet.
Even a minor change in water depth would dramatically increase waterfront realestate area.
The key here is the abandoned infrastructure origionaly left for the school an shoping mall.
People will flee further north with time as our lives become more decentralized and the climate become more temperate.
Pipelines from Alberta to BC are a political minefield but buying real-estate and then waiting for the politics to “blow-over” is apparently a thing that happens a lot.
If you're referring to Trans Mountain, that pipeline upgrade/expansion terminates in Burnaby, which is a suburb of Vancouver.
For other interesting company-owned ghost towns on the coast, see also Anyox and Ocean Falls. Anyox is relatively close to Kitsault and is worth reading about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anyox
There's also Stewart, which is north of these and which has quite a storied mining history that's still being written (the "Golden Triangle" of BC).