You could be right. Thunder bay could be ok but I don't know what would be cheapest, there or QC.

Ocean fright is very cheap compared to land transport so as long as you have cheap access to an ocean harbour shipping costs are low. As an example, I used to work in a plant in central parts of Europe and we got bulk shipments from Australia sent to Rotherdam, unloaded to barges and sent up the Rheine to Basel, and then by rail 150 miles to the plant. The rail shipment costed the same as the total from Australia, up the Rheine to Basel.

This is an inherit cost to the ROF location and ideally you want to ship out a high value material in order to manage shipping costs. I think I remember costs of about 5 to 10 cents per lb of nickel for concentrate shipments from Ragland or Voisey's Bay to Sudbury, corresponding to about 15-30 $/tonne of material. For a rich nickel concentrate worth 1000-2000 $/tonne this is a small fraction, but for a chrome ore this is significant.