25 big ideas that could change the North. Brainstorming with David Suzuki, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Ione Christensen, Ken Coates, Zen Coates, Zebedee Nungak and more...

Blessedly, the North is still a frontier. Even now, a half-century into the Space Age, the fate of this place is uncertain. Unlike the tamed and jaded south, where the ruts of routine are worn deep, up here even the basics remain a mystery. Who owns the land? How should we govern ourselves? Where do our borders lie?

Peering forward into our wide-open future, it’s clear the trail will be tricky. But we’re also lucky. Our homeland hasn’t been ruined – not yet. We still have a chance to learn from places that have gone before, and also to forge new learning, by being brilliant and daring. By being a bit crazy. By pioneering.

During Up Here’s 25 years, we’ve never been opinion-makers. We’ve championed just one thing: the North. It’s in that spirit that we fire off the following propositions – not because we endorse them, but because we endorse dreaming big, about our big frontier. Like nowhere else, the North will live or die by big ideas.

Build a university
It’s academic: The high latitudes need champions in higher learning, and scholars need a base up North.

We need a university in the North. The idea has been talked about since the ’60s. In the meantime, a handful of oh-so-Canadian half-measures – from degree-granting courses at colleges in the North to the enigmatic, internet-based University of the Arctic – have been offered as decoys to avoid the obvious.

“I’m in favour of the concept,” says Benoit Beauchamp, executive director of the Arctic Institute of North America in Calgary. “The North is hot, the Arctic is hot, and we’re not about to see a decrease in interest. There’s currently a convergence of issues that we’ve never seen in this country.”

Beauchamp says Canada “isn’t a great country” when it comes to spending in the North. He’s right. When one considers the cutbacks made to Arctic programs in the deficit-obsessed ’90s, it’s easy to see why many Canadian scientists gave up on Arctic research. Canada’s cyclical treatment of the region as today’s must-fix place and tomorrow’s forgotten backwater has made our scientists increasingly dumb the further North they go.

Critics of a university in the North argue the three Northern colleges offer practical diplomas as well as a few university degrees in co-operation with partner universities. But none function as a true university in the zeitgeist – advocating positions and chiming in during debates. That’s what’s needed, says Beauchamp: a mass of scholars living and working in the North. We hear traditional and political voices on Northern issues all the time, he says. “What we need is the scientific voice based in the North. I think that would be the great contribution that you could get from a university there.”

Dam the rivers
Let’s abandon imported fuel, go with the flow and live high off the hydro hog. By Keith Halliday

Climate change is a popular lose-lose with Northern doom-mongers, who think we’re condemned to slowly sink into the permafrost or watch carbon taxes send energy prices into the High Arctic. So let’s judo-flip climate change to our advantage. Imagine: Build more dams and make electricity free. Each territory takes $50-million (chump change nowadays), gets First Nations to chip in and slaps concrete across a few of our many rivers. We all fork over $25 per month to pay the salaries of our friends at the electrical company, but the price per kilowatt-hour would be zero. Nada.

It isn’t a pipedream. In the Yukon, most of the people complaining about energy costs live within 10 kilometres of a dam that spills surplus power 11-and-a-half months a year. Instead of using hydrocarbons to truck in hydrocarbons, let’s use what we’ve already got. We could heat our homes with electric heat-pumps instead of oil, drive plug-in electric cars since – admit it – we don’t go off-road much (my uncle, who spent a lifetime thrashing giant diesel beasts across the Yukon bush, now drives a Prius). We could lure trendy internet mavens to telecommute and sell carbon credits to desperate Torontonians. The potential for saving money while feeling smug is enormous. All we have to do is flood a few valleys and let the fun begin.

Keith Halliday is a telecommuting management consultant and author of children’s adventure novels. He is a fourth-generation Yukoner and lives in Whitehorse.

Require gender parity
In a region misruled by men, it’s unfair – to all of us – that the “fairer sex” shares so little of the power.

It was an idea that was floated and too quickly shot down: gender parity in Northern legislatures. In 1997, voters in Nunavut narrowly rejected the idea of requiring their territory’s nascent parliament to provide as many seats for women as men.

The aftermath of that defeat has been embarrassing. In its 2008 regular election, Nunavummiut picked just one woman, giving them the nation’s lowest ratio of female MLAs, at just five per cent. The other two territories are barely better: In the Yukon assembly, women make up just 11 per cent; in the NWT, 16 per cent. Those figures rank second-worst and fourth-worst in Canada.

Clearly, this is a Northern pattern. Likely, chauvinism is both a cause and a result. Examples of mistreatment of women are rampant up North. The territories lead the nation in spousal abuse and sexual assault. And Northern politicians have a hand in that, quite literally: Over the past decade, numerous sitting male legislators in the territories have been convicted of crimes against women.

This is, of course, disgusting. And it’s made even more disgusting by the fact that, among Northerners, women are more qualified to govern. Never mind their “unique female perspective,” they bring superior real-world skills: Northern women are, on average, better educated, are more likely to be employed in professional positions, and are less likely to be saddled with social dysfunction, be it criminality or suicidalism.

Basically, Northern women have their stuff together in a way men don’t. If they formed 90 per cent of our legislatures, rather than 10 per cent, the North would be better off. Fifty per cent – gender parity – seems the least we should demand.

Tie aid to CO2
With the Arctic in a meltdown, it’s time to help the Third World clean up its energy. By Sheila Watt-Cloutier

Climate change is the single most pressing issue affecting the Arctic; it’s the common thread in threats to our environmental and cultural human rights, the rush to resource extraction and reckless development, and the rise in geopolitical tensions. Quickly reversing climate change must be Canada’s foremost task in the Arctic.

This great challenge will require Canada to take enormous steps both to change our energy infrastructure and, just as importantly, to lead the world on a new course. The latest science indicates that we’ve already reached an unsustainable level of greenhouse gases. Although we emit far more than our fair share of these gases, particularly through emissions-intensive extraction like the Alberta tar sands, Canada still accounts for only a small portion of the global total. Just as important to the future of the Arctic are the factories, power plants and automobiles yet to be constructed in developing nations whose emissions will soon outpace our own. Recognizing that climate change in the Arctic is inevitably connected to development around the world, Canada should take bold international leadership and announce that our economy will become carbon-neutral within a decade.

To make such a change purely by switching off use of fossil fuels within such a short time would be practically impossible. To fill that gap, Canada should offset our remaining emissions at home by decreasing emissions elsewhere in the world. I propose a major new Canadian program to replace the dirtiest emissions in developing nations with renewable energy sources, and that we focus in particular on the indigenous peoples and the other communities most vulnerable to climate change. By redirecting and increasing our foreign aid to these projects, we would not only secure the future of the Arctic and the human rights of its peoples, but would guarantee renewable energy security, empower sustainable local economies, and advance human rights amongst those who otherwise stand to lose the most from climate change worldwide.

The time is ripe for Canada to again lead by our example, to take a principled stance on the global stage. All Canadians must now realize that only by thinking and acting globally will we be able to address our local problems here in the Arctic.

Sheila Watt-Cloutier is former chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council. She is the recipient of many awards for environmental advocacy, and in 2007 was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Get fast Internet
In a hyper-wired North, our long-isolated region could be a raging frontier of the global economy.

One of Europe’s most authentic Old World cities, Tallinn, Estonia, is now one of its fastest. Internet access is a constitutional right, and free wi-fi is everywhere. Skype and the International Cyber Defense Centre are based there, earning the county the nickname E-Stonia.

Meanwhile, the North’s urban centres – Iqaluit, Yellowknife and Whitehorse – are slow, and draining brains as a result. The fix is simple: Hook them up to a fibre-optic Internet cable as thick as a Volkswagen.

Most communities North of Sixty use expensive satellites to get online. In the Yukon, Internet arrives over radio waves. It’s sometimes fast, but sometimes unreliable, too, and it costs more than fibre access. Imagine if there wasn’t a penalty in speed or cost for heading to the North. What might happen?

An influx of creative types, that’s what. The North offers an unrivaled lifestyle, and scores high in areas that seem to matter to the new crop of what author Richard Florida calls the “creative class.” These people prefer places that are “diverse, tolerant, and open to new ideas.” They’re looking for a bohemian vibe, with wilderness and cultural weirdness. That describes the North to a T. Build the cable, and they will come.

Ban booze
When the North popped the cork, all hell broke loose. It’s time to re-bottle our demons.

In the fall of 2007, it made national news: The students of isolated Kugluktuk, Nunavut, got fed up with their parents being drunk. They marched in the streets and secured a community referendum on limiting alcohol. Some say they prayed for a “yes” vote. Their prayers were answered, and the flood of alcohol ebbed.

Elsewhere in the North, kids are less lucky. Forgive the boring stats: In the NWT, of the disturbing number of accidental deaths, alcohol is tied to nearly half, and to 40 per cent of suicides. In the Yukon, a rural doctor has called the fetal-alcohol problem “staggering.” In Nunavut’s capital, police say of all arrests, “80 per cent or higher are because of liquor-related issues.”

Accidents, suicides, birth defects, crime. The North trumps the nation in these woes. Unsurprisingly, it also leads Canada – far and away – in problem drinking. When bad stuff happens here, it stinks of booze.

Some say drinking is just a symptom – of everything from rural boredom to European colonialism. Maybe, but as researchers Paul Whitehead and Michael Hayes prove in The Insanity of Alcohol, “First Nations communities that have kept down their rates of alcoholism tend to have lower rates of other social problems.” Basically, whatever the cause, the cure is to target alcohol.

In the North, that’s already happening. In the Yukon, Old Crow has a booze-ban. The NWT has six towns that disallow alcohol and seven that limit it. In Nunavut, seven towns prohibit liquor, while limits exist in 13.

Do these rules work? Certainly. That’s why, prior to its plebiscite, when Kugluktuk needed to close its RCMP lock-up for renovations, it temporarily banned alcohol. Monthly detentions dropped from 59 to three. Such rules work in the long term, too. Studies out of Alaska show that “dry” towns have less violence and crime than “wet” towns.

All of which leads to a stunningly obvious idea. Prohibit alcohol in the North. Ban it outright. No more bottles in Ross River. Close the off-sales in Fort Providence. Shut the bar in Iqaluit. Lock up Yellowknife’s liquor stores. If small villages can do it, whole territories can – and should.

Re-settle the wilds
Once upon a time, people, too, were wild animals. We need to get back to (our) nature. By Dan O’Neill

Imagine a vast, wild landscape of a few million acres that’s managed like an enormous campground. Instead of a throng of campers visiting for a night or two, a few tough people might live in a remote area for years. And instead of them occupying a tiny campsite, each might instead occupy a log cabin and an entire river drainage area. The reaction I get to this idea from parkland administrators is dismissive. “It would be a management nightmare,” they say. But an award-winning project in Ohio proves otherwise.

In 1974, the U.S. National Park Service acquired farmland along the Cuyahoga River in Ohio and futilely attempted to re-establish wilderness by demolishing historic farmhouses and barns in the bottomland. Over the years, the lovely pastoral views along the Cuyahoga gave way to encroaching brush and boarded-up or tumbled down buildings. But in a brilliant reversal of policy, a brave new park superintendent decided to put people back on the landscape. Under a carefully managed program, several small, sustainable farms, barns and farmhouses were re-built and leased to people willing to accept appropriate restrictions. The project has been an award-winning success.

Northwest of Dawson City, just across the border in Alaska, sits the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, a unit of the U.S. National Park Service. Legislation that created the preserve in 1980 also provided for the continued residency of people who lived subsistence lifestyles there. The law declared subsistence living a cultural value and called for its protection.

During the 1970s and ’80s, perhaps 80 people lived in remote cabins in the Yukon-Charley. There weren’t many, as the boreal forest is its own limiter. But subsequent regulations killed subsistence residence there altogether. Today, not a single person holds a permit to live there.

That’s a shame. And an opportunity. The Cuyahoga story proves that drawing up suitable safeguards, though complex, needn’t be a “management nightmare.” I think it’s an idea that might work in the North.
Dan O’Neill is the author of A Land Gone Lonesome: An Inland Voyage Along the Yukon River, which touches on the idea presented here. He lives in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Become sovereigns
The Arctic has already seen too many overlords. The key, instead, is stewardship By Franklyn Griffiths

Canadians should stop worrying about our Arctic possessions and instead move forward in building an Arctic in which all exercise proper care in the enjoyment and exploitation of a shared environment. We should be aiming for co-operative stewardship as well as national sovereignty.

Academics and others whom I call “purveyors of polar peril” have helped politicians and the media persuade us we have far greater sovereignty problems than we actually do. “Use it or lose it” typifies the misguided thinking of southerners who, removed from Arctic realities, seek to maintain remote control over the North.

Stewardship means locally informed governance that not only polices, but also cares for and respects, the natural environment and all living things in it, humans included. Stewardship cannot be done in isolation. In the Arctic it requires not only national but international cooperation. Leadership for co-operative stewardship should come from Northerners in Canada, from those who know the region best and are uniquely positioned to bring a circumpolar perspective to the politics of Canada’s Arctic policies.

We should come out of the shell of our concern for sovereignty and start to act like sovereigns. We need to join with others in the region and take care before it’s too late for the Arctic.

Franklyn Griffiths is professor emeritus of political science and George Ignatieff Chair emeritus of peace and conflict studies at the University of Toronto.

Create a tax haven
You want more residents and businesses up North? Then make is less costly to thrive here.

As everyone from the Conservatives to the Greens have figured out, if you want less of something, you tax it. If you want more, you don’t. Lately, everyone’s wanting more Arctic sovereignty. Boots on the ground, use it or lose it, and so forth.

But how to do it? The Harperites suggest icebreakers and army reservists. The lefties want better Northern housing and infrastructure. But here’s an idea both sides can plant their flag in: Boost Arctic sovereignty by slashing individual income taxes and making the North a big ol’ tax haven.

Last February, the Conservatives gave a little nod in that direction, hiking the Northern Residents Tax Deduction. The deduction was invented in 1987, at least in part to encourage people to live North of Sixty. By increasing the deduction by 10 per cent, to an annual per-person maximum of $6,022, the Conservatives gave Northerners $10-million in extra reasons to stay in the territories.

Still, when you take into account inflation, the hike was pennies on the dollar. NWT MP Dennis Bevington of the New Democrats had been clamouring for a far bigger increase – of 50 per cent. And why stop there? Why not eliminate personal income taxes in the North altogether? The amount the feds gather from income tax here is negligible – barely $100-million. That’s one-seventh the cost of Prime Minister Harper’s proposed new icebreaker. And zeroing out the Northern income tax isn’t as radical as it sounds. Residents of U.S. territories, including the four million Puerto Ricans, pay exactly no dollars in federal tax.

So, that deals with the employee side of the ledger. But what about employers? Well, also following the American example, Ottawa could make the North an “empowerment zone.” Empowerment zones are places where business-taxes are tweaked to spark economic growth. Businesses in U.S. empowerment zones get $3,000 tax credits for each local they hire, and can qualify for a variety of other loans and tax-breaks. They’ve been most famously used to revive riot-wracked South Central Los Angeles. But they’re also spurring growth in rural places, including Indian reservations.

Sure, jimmying with the tax code isn’t the sole solution to shoring up Arctic sovereignty and boosting the population and economy of the North. But as far as bang for Ottawa’s buck, it’s the simplest method, and could be the most effective.

Block the pipeline
Both ecologically and economically, the Mackenzie Gas Project is really a reject. By David Suzuki

As we use up more and more of the Earth’s fossil fuels, prices are skyrocketing. And burning the fuels causes a host of environmental problems, including global warming. The solution seems obvious: reduce reliance on fossil fuels through conservation, and increase renewable energy.

But it’s not obvious to everyone. In the North, industry and government are determined to suck every drop of oil and gas out of the ground and send it south – in the case of natural gas, through a 1,220-kilometre pipeline along the Mackenzie River.

But the problems with fossil fuels aren’t the only reason to take a second look at the Mackenzie Gas Project. A recent report by the Canadian Boreal Initiative, The Real Wealth of the Mackenzie Region, concludes the “natural capital” of the Mackenzie region is worth 11 times the market value. The study’s authors estimate the market value of the Mackenzie watershed is $41.9-billion per year (based on gross domestic product) and the non-market value is $483.8-billion, based on the potential value of 17 ecosystem services. In other words, the economic value of things such as clean air, clean water, carbon absorption and storage, and healthy, productive landscapes is much higher than the economic value of things such as resource extraction. It may seem absurd to put a price on nature, and it is neither an easy nor exact process, but if we don’t account for the real value of natural services, they get left out of our market-driven economic equations.

The report doesn’t argue for a complete halt to resource extraction in the Mackenzie ecosystem, but it does suggest that better stewardship is needed “so that valuable ecosystem services can be maintained while meeting human needs and economic development objectives.” In other words, it’s about finding a balance.

And speaking of economics, think of the amount of renewable energy that could be generated with the $16.2-billion the Mackenzie Gas Project is expected to cost.

David T. Suzuki, PhD, is an award-winning scientist, environmentalist and broadcaster, and is cofounder of the David Suzuki Foundation (davidsuzuki.org).

Don’t turn southern
In an increasingly insipid world, the North must resist assimilation and trumpet its compelling quirks.

The Earth is shrinking fast. Big cultures are swallowing small ones. Regional dialects are dying, and local traditions are succumbing to global ones. Our complex planet is getting dulled and blunted. And the North is losing its Northern-ness.

Sure, it’s inevitable. Even in Old Crow and Lutselk’e and Grise Fiord, the Internet and airplanes make a sucking sound that tugs us toward mass culture. But just because we can’t win doesn’t mean we shouldn’t resist.

Put your shoulder against the citification of the North. The Yukon has already collapsed into Whitehorse – three-quarters of that territory live in the capital. The NWT and Nunavut are trending that way, too. Meanwhile, small places are perishing. In the past generation, outposts like Reliance and Tungsten and Elsa and Umingmaktok have basically vanished from the map.
Not only are Northerners moving to Northern cities, but those cities are becoming more city-like. In the capitals, there’s a push to drive up density, by encouraging condos and highrises. Cabin culture is being killed. Doesn’t the world have enough effete urbanites? Does the North, too, need to become metrosexual? Can’t a case be made for the value of living immersed in wilderness?

In summary: Be Northern. Build a house out of town. Wear moosehide and sealskin. Park your car in your yard. Pee by the highway. Take your dog to work. Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em. Say “the Yukon” (What gutless bureaucrat dropped the “the”?). Jaywalk. Commute on your quad. Look people in the eye. Don’t shave – and ladies, that goes for you. Curse. Spit. Enter without knocking. Eat bannock, dry-meat and tea. Build campfires in your yard. Shop at the dump. Call the rest of world “Outside.” Kill your cellphone. Kill your dinner. And stop acting like a goddamn southerner.

Embrace immigration
The territories want workers and foreigners want jobs. Ever the twain should meet. By Rick Karp

In recent years, several Latin American families have moved to Whitehorse hoping to become Canadians. While they’ve trudged through endless red tape, they’ve taken unavoidable jobs that many Yukoners would rather not do – from baking donuts at coffee shops to sweeping floors at high schools to changing the diapers of our children. Our community has benefited and they’ve benefited. But in the end most of them have been forced to leave – deported or otherwise. This has been a blow to our economy and to our community.

During the last territorial election, the Whitehorse and Yukon Chambers of Commerce made labour a key issue. Since then our economy has continued to grow but our supply of workers hasn’t. In the most recent business survey completed by the Yukon Bureau of Statistics, more than 30 per cent of businesses said they had vacancies. The number of workers needed in the Yukon is now 600. If our current mining boom continues that could easily shoot above 1,000 – in a territory with just 33,000 people.

Our immigration policies don’t reflect this crisis. In Whitehorse, hard-working, dependable refugee claimants have been forced to leave even though they were contributing to our community. Some steps have been taken. Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker program – though expensive and slow – has helped. A nominee program offered by the Yukon Government, where skilled workers can be “nominated” by a business in need of a tradesperson with their skills, is also helping. But we need more. We need an immigration policy that sends immigrants north.

So what’s my big idea? Immigration is just one cure for the labour shortage in the Yukon and across the North. The others are incentives for people living on social-assistance or collecting employment-insurance to take a job. But streamlining immigration is the quickest and easiest fix. Rather than enticing people to work, it would welcome those who know working hard is part of the bargain for them becoming Canadian. The Yukon, as with all of the North, would gladly be their new home.

Rick Karp is the president of the Whitehorse Chamber of Commerce. He taught school in Ontario for 14 years before he and his wife moved to Whitehorse to open the territory’s first McDonald’s. After 14 years they sold the restaurant and now own a hair salon.

Jump-start research
A big-money Arctic science-and-technology award could stoke the stillborn field of polar studies.

You’ve heard of the X Prize, right? Sponsored in 1996 by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, it offered $10-million to the first citizen to send a manned craft into space. Before the prize was won in 2004, contestants spent $100-million and generated countless technological breakthroughs.

Since then, three other X Prizes have been launched – for sequencing the human genome, creating a super-efficient car, and sending a rover to the moon.

The North could really use an X Prize.

What would it be for? Noble efforts, perhaps, like stemming the Arctic meltdown. Or amusing efforts, like extracting DNA from permafrost-locked mammoths and reincarnating that species (Siberian scientists are already trying it).

But it barely matters what you pick. What matters is jump-starting Arctic science and technology. Given the long-suffering state of Canadian polar research (in some years, the U.S. has out-spent Canada sevenfold, despite having much less polar territory), someone needs to set a fire under it.

And who would that be? Who would pony up the fortune in prize money that would be required? It turns out that’s easy. X Prize number two, the one about the human genome, was solely funded by none other than Stu Blusson, the former NWT prospector who co-discovered the Ekati diamond deposit. Stu scraped together $10-million for that prize. According to Canadian Business, his net worth is $497-million. Waddaya say, Stu? Got any spare change for X Prize North?

Face up to FAS
The territories’ dirty secret, the fetal-alcohol plague can only be blunted if confronted. By Ione Christensen
If a bear charges in the bush, do you shut your eyes? No. If you don’t act, you’ll get a smack – at the very least. Our communities, territories and country get a smack each time a child is born with fetal alcohol syndrome. But we often close our eyes rather than facing the truth and acting.

Over a lifetime, it costs more than $3-million to care for a person with FAS – including health, education, social welfare, incarceration, institutionalisation, and the cost to society for the loss of property and productivity. But anguish experienced by the family and the individual is the greatest tragedy.

Social denial is the root FAS uses to survive. The saying, “It takes a community to raise a child,” couldn’t be truer with the disorder. No mother intentionally puts her child at risk. But alcohol addiction is powerful: Without spousal, family and community support, mothers can have great difficulty having a healthy child. Many see FAS in the North as only a First Nations or Inuit problem, but they’re wrong. It exists in any society where alcohol is consumed. Stereotyping is a way to deny the problem. Many in the treatment field also see FAS as a brain injury, believing therapy can significantly improve the patient. That’s another myth. The sad truth is that FAS is permanent brain damage. Preventable, yes, but permanent.

The Yukon has been a leader in addressing FAS. Our liquor stores place warning labels on alcohol. We have an active diagnostic program and an information booklet, Trying Differently, which sells internationally. We also have numerous education programs. But we still fall short. The big idea is to admit that. Then we can emerge from denial into action.

We need more FAS education in schools, use of funds generated by our large liquor tax, ongoing programs for assisted living for persons with FAS, and more community education and support. Northerners are innovative, compassionate and willing to try new approaches. Our communities are small enough to experiment until we get it right. With FAS, we can develop a solution other parts of Canada can use with success.

Ione Christensen is a fourth-generation Yukoner and until recently was the Liberal senator for the Yukon. She is now on the board of directors for the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome Society of Yukon. '

Create one big park
The solution to both climate-change and sovereignty? Make the North a vast preserve. By James Hrynyshyn
Consider the red-tape nightmare that currently plagues wilderness preservation. Shepherding and opposing new parks is an endless, expensive make-work project for lawyers, biologists and consultants. We could put an end to that by declaring the North the largest national park on Earth.

Imagine a terrestrial and marine protected area encompassing the 3.5 million square kilometres of the Yukon, NWT, Nunavut and the waters that lie between the 60th parallel and the pole. No more arguing over how much of the Nahanni watershed should be protected. The days of boundary negotiations would be behind us.

It may sound draconian but it doesn’t have to be. The park’s only restrictions on resource extraction would be on fossil fuels. Why? Because everyone knows climate change is undermining the ecology of the North, where the warming is three times the global average. What better way to signal our opposition to business-as-usual than making oil and gas reserves in the North off limits?

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, 90 billion barrels of oil lie untapped north of the Arctic Circle. That’s a 10th of known conventional reserves. More than 30 per cent of the world’s undiscovered natural gas may be there, too. Take it all away and everyone – especially the Russian and Danish diplomats now arguing with Canada over drilling rights to the Arctic Ocean’s Lomonosov Ridge, northwest of Greenland – will take us seriously. They’ll object, but at least Canada will be negotiating from the moral high ground. Indeed, transforming Canada’s North into one big park may be the most powerful action we can take to address global warming.

Advocates of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline won’t be pleased, but the diamond mines should be able to live with the new rules. The benefits to the hunting and tourism industries and First Nations are obvious. And don’t forget the whales and polar bears.

James Hrynyshyn is a Canadian science journalist based in North Carolina. He spent five years as a reporter and editor with Northern News Services in Inuvik and Yellowknife.

Rename the NWT
It’s neither ‘northwest’ nor ‘territories.’ So what exactly is it? It’ll only know by devising a new name.

The NWT has an identity crisis. It’s a rump state – the last scrap of the vast “North-West Territories” that once spanned western Canada. Over 13 decades, hunks of it were pared away (Nunavut was just the latest indignity), leaving a leftover district with a leftover title.

For at least a dozen years now there’s been talk of reinvigorating the territory’s identity by re-branding it. As former premier Stephen Kakfwi stated, “The Northwest Territories is not a name. Rather, it’s a direction – a geographic label in relation to Ottawa. We owe it to ourselves to move on and accept that change must come.”

But so far, the effort has gone nowhere. Round one, in the ‘90s, stalled when the debate was hi-jacked by wags urging the territory be called “Bob.” (Its official sport could be bobsledding, they said; its police, bobbies.) Further efforts, in 2002 and 2004, also ran aground. One problem was apathy: When quizzed, most permanent NWT residents shrugged and said they were okay with the status quo. (The short-termers –- carpetbaggers with little commitment to the territory – were even less interested.)

The other problem was that, among the non-apathetic elite, there were deep divisions. Dene leaders liked “Denendeh,” “Nahendeh” or “Deh Cho.” Inuvialuit honchos suggested “Nunakput.” Given that impasse, people suggested the territory had bigger problems to deal with.

But those hurdles – apathy, transiency, infighting and “bigger problems to deal with” – are no reason to abandon the name-change effort. Quite the opposite. It’s precisely because the NWT is a splintered, problem-dogged “territories” that it needs to transform its identity – to become impassioned, committed, united. It’s the effort that’s key: Renaming the NWT is important because it’s hard, forcing the region to decide what it wants to be. The NWT needs to walk through the fires of the name-change debate. Out of that process may emerge not just a name, but, finally, a territory.

Permit a winter siesta
Northerners aren’t dim. So why are we trapped inside during the precious few hours of winter light?

Anyone who’s clawed their way through a polar winter knows it’s not mainly the cold or snow that pain – it’s the claustrophobic darkness. And those inky days are made more abysmal by the fact that, during the fleeting moments of midday light, we’re almost invariably inside, at work.

Some numbers: In Whitehorse, nine-to-fivers will go to work in the dark and come home in the dark over a period of 76 days, from mid-November to late January. In Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, that figure leaps to 102 days; way up in Grise Fiord it’s 133.

It’s crazy that Northerners are shut inside at precisely the only bright period of the day. And it’s also dangerous.

A recent torrent of research suggests sun-exposure is elemental to good health. For starters, sun is our best source of Vitamin D – the lack of which plays a role in everything from diabetes to brittle bones to cancer. As well, “getting some rays” staves off seasonal affective disorder – SAD – which fuels sleepiness, depression, and even suicide.

There’s an obvious solution: Liberate Northern workers during more of the precious, vital minutes that the sun is up. Give them time to be out in the light – a sort of reverse siesta – by switching their work schedules to earlier or later in the day, or by providing a midday break long enough for them to go skidooing, skiing or strolling to the store in the sun.

Know the North

The true North strong and free, eh? Then it’s about time we truly embrace our territories. By Ken Coates
It’s been years since the North dominated headlines like it does today. Questions about sovereignty, resources and national boundaries have all raised people’s attention. But the nature of the debate, dominated by southern surprise that the North is of international importance, has revealed a paradox. Canada, though Northern, is not yet a truly Northern nation.

My greatest wish is for our country to realize the uniqueness of its North. Imagine the benefits. If Canada were a Northern nation, subsidies for transportation and travel would enable Canadians to move inexpensively to the North. This support would keep Northern costs within national norms, stabilize communities and improve the standard of living. Job opportunities would attract people willing to consider permanent relocation. No longer would people view the North as an opportunity to get rich quick. Instead, it would be an attractive option for people from across the country.

If Canada became Northern, Canadians would know and celebrate the political transformations that have occurred. The empowerment of aboriginal and territorial governments, the development of collaborative models of community development, and the creation of new processes of environmental management, drawing significantly on aboriginal knowledge, would serve as the inspiration for policy across the country. And the federal and territorial governments would develop a strategy for Arctic integration. Defence plans would be co-ordinated with resource developments, regional infrastructure needs and indigenous aspirations.

Finally, if Canada were a Northern nation, we’d never have endless debates about Arctic sovereignty. We don’t obsess about the future of B.C. or ponder challenges to the geographical integrity of Manitoba. The North would have a permanent place in the national fabric and would not be subject to cyclical interest and southern neglect.

To become a Northern nation, Canadians need to overcome their inherent bias against winter and cold, and move beyond mythology toward a sophisticated understanding of the North. The Arctic and Subarctic must cease to be foreign territories hidden by distance and climate, and instead must be seen as a viable, appealing and utterly normal part of Canada.

Ken Coates was raised in the Yukon and has written extensively on Arctic and indigenous issues. He is the dean of arts at the University of Waterloo.

Stop CO2 hypocrisy

If Northerners really care about warming, we need to do more than drive to protests in our pickups.
In the canary-in-a-coalmine North, it’s still not a social faux pas to leave a car idling outside the video store while returning An Inconvenient Truth. Greenpeace stickers on SUVs still don’t elicit snickers. Outdoor buffs still get “closer to nature” using snowmobiles and dirt bikes. We’ve basked in righteousness as the victims of carbon dioxide – “Oh, the permafrost!” – while still flying as often as birds and burning diesel to generate electricity. Each person in the NWT emits more than 30 tonnes of carbon per year, according to the NWT government. That’s nearly a third more than the Canadian average. We’re the carbon generation’s biggest hypocrites.

There are signs of hope. The Yukon has the highest number of R2000-rated homes in Canada, per capita. Monster trucks in Yellowknife share the road with lots of bicyclists and a few Smart cars. Residents of the territories commute the shortest distances to work, and in the 2006 Statistics Canada census, led the nation by a huge margin in walking to that work.

But to continue receiving the world’s fickle goodwill, we need a mea culpa beyond compare. We, the victims of increased temperatures, changing ecosystems and threatened traditional lifestyles, need to concede that the least we can do is turn off our heat in the summer, turn off our trucks in parking lots and take our canoes fishing rather than our speedboats. We must sacrifice like everyone else.

Manufacture up North

While assembly plants are being shuttered in Ontario, they may well have a future in the Arctic.
Today, the majority of small new-car components – wheels, stereos, air conditioners – are manufactured in China, Japan and Korea. Tomorrow China will be building engines and transmissions. What few want to talk about is the next step – when China builds entire cars and sells them to us at cut-throat prices. It’s about to happen: cash-strapped Chrysler recently inked a deal with China’s Chery Automobile to build a subcompact car for North America. If we want auto jobs to stay in Canada, is Ontario the right place to mount our battle? Nope. But far-flung Tuktoyaktuk might be.

From its perch at the mouth of the Mackenzie River, Tuk is a rational place to build tomorrow’s cars. Shanghai and Hong Kong, as well as Japan and Korea, are all a quick container-boat ride away. Getting the cars to market would also be revolutionarily different. For a century, barges have been plying the Mackenzie River between Tuk and Hay River, on Great Slave Lake, where there’s a railhead south. This river route continues to cause Big Business to dream. Right now, the tar-sands industry is studying this route to feed millions of tonnes of Chinese supplies to Fort McMurray, Alberta, smack dab in the middle of Canada.

This old route is about to become new again. It can be the corridor for a whole new supply chain. Let’s think rationally: We should build tomorrow’s Civics and Corollas at auto plants in Tuk, and ship them to North Americans via the Mackenzie.

Adjourn the meetings
Once-proud Northerners are now slaves to motions and quorums. Let’s gavel out. By Zebedee Nungak
Years ago, at the height of my involvement with community organizations, I was preparing to attend yet another meeting. One of my sons, five years old at the time, gave me a piercing look and said, “Katimagiaqturaqtiingai! (Hello, you constant attender of never-ending meetings!)” I had no reply. Keenly aware of what was taking up his father’s time, my son decked me with a profound truth.

Meetings are the artificial lifeblood of the modern Arctic community. In the absence of rule by decree, they’re unavoidable. But the frequency and rhythm of meetings has become intense. One day it becomes clear the meeting schedule has become your boss. Your family becomes the last thing on your to-do list. The little things that make life a joy are discarded by necessity. Then they become nearly inaccessible, victim to the imperative of all-consuming meetings.

An elected representative without extra leadership responsibilities travels outside their community at least four times a year. Even this ordinary “meeter” spends much time covering the sheer distances necessary to go to and from meetings. Those in executive positions occupy a unique place in meeting-dom. Their whole existence is dictated by never-ending meetings, each of which has to be treated as the most important event on Earth. Any semblance of a normal life is sacrificed. Time spent out on the land, the great sanity-retainer, becomes a rare luxury.

Useful life-skills for Inuit, such as hunting and sewing, were taught from childhood. Competence at meetings is not learned this way. Nobody has learned by following their father while he went to meetings. There is no Institute of Meeting Instruction, and any ordinary person can become a “meeter.” Practicing “meeters” are rarely praised, as in saying: “He is renowned for his uncommon skill at chairing meetings,” or, “She has no equal as a drafter of resolutions.”

Knowing the ins and outs of meetings cannot be equated with proficiency in other areas vital, even today, for Inuit to live in the Arctic. Meeting skills can be utterly worthless when put beside traditional skills, such as knowing how to pursue caribou and seals. The next meeting agenda should be: How can we balance the imperative of meetings with the more important things in life?

Zebedee Nungak is an accomplished writer whose satirical essays on Qallunology, the Inuit study of white people, inspired a comic documentary film. He lives in the village of Kangirsuk, Nunavik, with his wife and seven children.

Reap from rooftops
They’re warm, flat, numerous and free. Throw a greenhouse on top and you’ve got an Arctic farm.

When it comes to food, there’s abundance and shortage in the North. A shortage of topsoil, space and days above zero mean locally grown fruits and vegetables can’t satiate local demands. What’s in abundance is grocery-store produce with more miles on it than a rusty pickup. But also abundant is another, more invisible food resource – the litany of government buildings that dot our cities, towns and communities. All have roofs. They are the next generation’s fields.

Idea: Every federal, territorial, First Nation and Inuit government building should be required to host a rooftop greenhouse. These greenhouses should be leased to small-scale farmers, who will then sell better tasting, low-mileage produce at prices competitive with the increasingly unsustainable grocery stores. Everybody, except the food chains, would win.

“Roofs are the ideal space for a greenhouse in the North,” says Dwayne Wohlgemuth, co-chair of the Yellowknife Community Garden Collective. “It’s just black asphalt and wasted space.” A rooftop greenhouse solves several problems for growing up here. It wouldn’t require a new building or an abandoned one; its height would maximize exposure to sunlight; and the building below would provide free heat. This would allow growing seasons to be extended without requiring expensive heating. Wohlgemuth estimates a six-month season could be possible in Inuvik, where the natural season is only two months. Up to eight months could be possible in Whitehorse and Yellowknife. Suddenly, crops such as corn and watermelons could be grown at home. Chew on that.

Flip the map

On most charts, ‘north’ is marginalized – literally. Upside down, we’re centre stage. By Jack Kobayashi
My brother in Toronto tells friends my architectural practice thrives in the spring, when my buildings melt. It’s a great joke that illustrates people’s ignorance of the North.

Look at the standard Canadian map and it’s easy to understand why people see us as a forgotten backyard. To locate the majority of Canada’s population along the border, the map dips into the United States. Canada then swells northward, becoming more unfamiliar the farther north you look.

Our country has official bilingualism. We also need two official versions of the Canadian map – one of them flipped. Kids, try this at home. Rotate your map upside down. Suddenly, Northern communities occupy a central position. Yellowknife appears at the centre, flanked by Iqaluit and Whitehorse. Toronto flails off in the distance.

Long-haul pilots understand this view. Inbound transcontinental airlines fly daily “great circle” routes – the shortest distance between two points – over the Canadian Arctic. European pilots see Baffin Island as the front porch of North America.

The new map would be part motivational poster and part weapon in the conflict simmering over the Northwest Passage. It would create a more convincing image of Canada’s Arctic archipelago – as a whole, rather than the porous gauntlet perceived by other countries. So let’s change it and send the new map to all the embassies in the European Union. We don’t have any real weapons, so why not use the cartographer as one?

Remember how easy it was as a kid to cut through someone’s backyard? You didn’t cut through the front yard, because that was way harder to get away with.

Jack Kobayashi is an award-winning Whitehorse architect. He wrote this on a great circle flight over Greenland.

Ditch syllabics
Inuit hold their unorthodox writing system close to their heart – but erasing it would let them get ahead.

On the floor-to-ceiling shelves of Atuakkiorfik, Greenland’s official publishing house in Nuuk, you’ll find such bestselling titles as Shakespeare’s Macbeth Allallu, Hemingway’s Angutitoqaq Imarlu and Agatha Christie’s Akunnitsinni Arlarput Inuartuuvoq. You probably couldn’t read these books, because they’re written in Inuktitut. But weirdly, Inuit in Canada’s Eastern Arctic would have a tough time reading them too, though they speak the same language.

That’s because in Nunavik and most of Nunavut, Inuktitut is written not in the familiar A-to-Z alphabet used in Greenland and the rest of the Inuit world, but in syllabics, a shorthand script introduced by Arctic missionaries in the 1870s.

There’s a problem with syllabics, though: Save for the Bible and a few children’s books, there’s little published in it. Syllabics texts are expensive to produce (requiring special software and involving poor economies of scale). And Canadian Inuit – unlike their Greenlandic cousins – haven’t developed much of a canon.

An obvious solution would be for the Eastern Arctic to abandon syllabics in favour of the standard alphabet, and to then draw on Greenland’s trove of literature (Atuakkiorfik has operated since 1956 and boasts nearly 500 titles, including books about dinosaurs and playing the guitar).

So far, elders have resisted, feeling the syllabics are part of the Eastern Arctic’s cultural heritage. That’s understandable, but not practical. The stark choice faced by the Eastern Arctic was well articulated by another common-writing-system advocate, Greenlandic poet and former Inuit Circumpolar Conference president Aqqaluk Lynge, in a 2002 interview with the CBC: “If you don’t make compromises … then the time will pass and you’ll end up losing your language.”