This article was adapted from a speech given by Ken Coates, Distinguished Fellow and Director of Indigenous Affairs at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. The event, Linkages Thompson, took place in Thompson, Manitoba, in February 2024.
By Ken Coates, June 26, 2024
In the last two years, Canada has seen yet another of its episodic bursts of Arctic enthusiasm, sparked in this instance by a combination of concern for climate change and Russian aggression capped by the invasion of Ukraine. The conversations are earnest and well-meaning but there seems to be little meat on these Arctic bones at present.
Put simply, Canada has lost sight of the possibilities of the North. The country focuses far more on northern problems, but not with sufficient conviction to making things better. As with the country’s decades-long crisis with drinking water in Indigenous communities, Canadians congratulate themselves for fixing a problem that should not have been allowed to fester in the first place.
In the post-Second World War period, Canada was a global leader in northern development, albeit with little respect for the needs and interests of Indigenous peoples. With the Diefenbaker government’s Roads to Resources Program providing the main impetus, Canada built roads, railways, many new mines, and hydro-electric dams. Planned cities, like Thompson, Manitoba, and Schefferville, Quebec, represented major investments in the future of the North. Other company towns – Uranium City, Saskatchewan, Clinton Creek, Yukon, Granisle and Cassiar in British Columbia, Pine Point in the Northwest Territories, and Labrador City in Newfoundland and Labrador – sprang up across the country.
For a few heady years in the 1960s, the provincial and territorial Norths seemed central to Canadian plans for future economic development. The North would be, in the last half of the 20th century and beyond, what the West had been in the late 19th century. The enthusiasm soon waned. Infrastructure development slowed. The Dempster Highway to Inuvik in the NWT, with major construction starting in the mid-1960s, was not opened until 1979; the extension to Tuktoyaktuk opened only in 2017.
Canada moved Northward on the basis of two fundamental miscalculations: an over-estimation of the resource wealth of the region and an underestimation of the social and environmental costs of rapid development. By the 1970s, the bloom had come off the Arctic rose. Once promising Arctic oil and gas projects were shuttered, and major improvements delayed or cancelled. Government programming expanded and built key administrative centres, particularly Iqaluit, Yellowknife, and Whitehorse, providing a thin veneer of prosperity.
In the last quarter of the 20th century, Canada became aggressively and impressively urban. City states dominated the economy and became the overwhelming focus for national innovation and technological investments. The North languished, in both national and comparative terms. The nation even turned its back on winter, with mass tourism to warmer climates and national disinterest in the North growing steadily. In the territorial North, reliance on government soared; the resource economy did better in the provincial North, but even here welfare dependency became the cornerstone of most communities.
Other parts of the circumpolar world have been doing considerably better. The isolated Faroe Islands converted fishing farming, whaling, and cultural pride into a burst of prosperity. Northern Norway converted the “blue economy” of off-shore oil and gas development and the country’s general prosperity into a rapid regional modernization. Northern Finland rode the Nokia-driven success of the City of Oulu and the surprising success of Rovaniemi’s Santa Claus Village to northern prosperity. In North Sweden, a powerful combination of mining, winter tourism, Luleå-area server farms, commercial innovation, and the community-driven capture of the massive battery factory complex in Skelleftea brought widespread opportunity. Even Greenland has made major investments in airfields and Arctic-related tourism that hold the promise of an economic boom.
The situation facing the Canadian North is mixed. There are a handful of long-term multi-generational mines that produce impressive sub-regional prosperity. The mining industry has generally solid relations with Indigenous communities, with excellent examples from Voisey Bay in Labrador to the Yukon, and particularly extensive collaborations with Cameco’s uranium mines in northern Saskatchewan, the diamond mines in the Northwest Territories and the oil sands in Alberta.
Northern challenges are real, especially in the small and remote Indigenous communities. The opioid crisis represents a major threat, adding to existing serious health care challenges. The long-term effects of poverty and government domination of Indigenous peoples have left deep and painful scars. Education lags well behind much of the Circumpolar world; there is no Canadian equivalent of the large and impressive Scandinavian universities in Oulu, Rovaniemi, Luleå, Umeå, Tromsø, and Bodø.
Turnover among professional staff in the North remains high; fly-in/fly-out workers dominate the natural resource sector. In an unexpected twist, a significant number of northerners signed on with northern resource companies and capitalized on the security of employment to relocate their families to southern communities. Transiency among teachers, offset in part by North-centred teacher education programs, exacerbates the problems of community poverty and weakens educational outcomes.
Across the region, community infrastructure and services are generally not up to national standards. These shortcomings limit the growth potential of the region and leave communities struggling to serve their citizens. Building a new economy is difficult when the underpinnings of the last economy remain incomplete.
Northern Manitoba, an area typically ignored in national discussions of the North’s potential, provides valuable insights into challenges and opportunities of the Canadian North. For generations – from the late 17th century to the end of the 19th century – northern Manitoba has been the cornerstone of the Canadian fur trade. That sector remained active into the 1950s. Subsequently, the Indigenous economy in the area has been dominated by welfare dependency and other forms of state paternalism, offset by significant mining operations and the seriously disruptive effects of large-scale hydro-electric developments along the rivers flowing into Hudson Bay.
At present, northern Manitoba (and much of the provincial North) has much of what the world needs: fresh water, forests, minerals, and hydro-electric potential. It also has cold weather, increasingly important in a “hot” world. Indigenous cultural knowledge, northern lights tourism potential, and impressive outdoor recreational options add to the province’s allure. There is growing demand for northern minerals, bringing widespread prospects for development to northern Manitoba. The sector is, internationally, volatile, and unpredictable, providing an uncertain foundation for long-term economic development.
Mining will clearly proceed on a different foundation than the past, largely due to the combination of environmental concerns and the re-empowerment of Indigenous peoples. The legal and constitutional rights of First Nations and Metis, the court-established “duty to consult and accommodate” requirements, and the prospect of future legal challenges, including over the Natural Resources Transfer Act of 1930, have strengthened the authority of Indigenous peoples and governments. Indigenous communities will, by law, be active participants in the next economy.
Out-migration, particularly by young people, adds to labour challenges in northern Manitoba. Efforts are being made to train people to stay, particularly through the extensive and creative activities of the University of the North, but the regional population is stagnant. There is, furthermore, no clear regional aspiration for future population growth. More than anything, northern Manitoba shares the consequences of the aversion of the overwhelmingly urban country to winter, isolation, and the North. Canada used to define itself largely in northern terms. It does this no longer.
Canada’s Northern regions, including northern Manitoba, can do much better. Indigenous re-empowerment and the spread of self-government and autonomy is crucial to future success. Indeed, economic reconciliation will soon emerge, in the words of Indigenous leader JP Gladu, as “Canada’s commercial advantage.” Economic returns to northern areas proceed best when Indigenous communities capitalize on good relations with the resource sector. These partnerships produce employment opportunities, support the growth of Indigenous businesses, and capitalize on stronger Indigenous governments.
Changes are still required. Resource revenue sharing, arrangements built into treaties in the three northern territories, would generate local revenue and supports Indigenous engagement. They are, in many parts of the country but not uniformly across Canada, a significant element in the resource economy. Indigenous communities have developed strengths of their own, including equity investment in community infrastructure, active and creative Indigenous economic development corporations, new levels of Indigenous commercial cooperation through the First Nations Major Projects Coalition, and over four dozen Indigenous financial institutions (like the First Nations Bank).
There are many opportunities for innovation. In Manitoba, there is the possibility for an Indigenous owned gas pipeline to a floating port off Churchill. Wilderness tourism could grow substantially as could value-added resource processing and manufacturing. The North could generate new opportunities if the nation’s research institutes turned their attentions to practical northern innovations, in fields as diverse as food factories, remote surgery, educational reform, alternate energy, and unique uses of artificial intelligence. Northern educational institutions can connect business and the workforce to education and training and can prioritize the integration of Indigenous and western knowledge.
To succeed, and the circumpolar world provides useful examples, the North requires intense and purposeful collaboration. It cannot be passive; instead, the North must both seek and create opportunities. The combination of Indigenous governments, local communities, large and small business, the non-governmental sector and philanthropists can move faster and more comprehensively than waiting for government-led economic renewal. Provincial governments and the Government of Canada can provide support and investment, but the impetus must be rooted in the broader North. Put simply, the North must be about more than resource development and must not just wait for government and outside businesses to lead the region toward prosperity.
Northern regions can succeed and can do extremely well in the 21st century economy. Innovative regional economies share certain characteristics. They know about global realities and look for lessons from other successful northern regions. They work aggressively to address clear shortcomings. In Greenland, this has focused on the construction of two international airports. In northern Manitoba, the key initiatives focus on work-related Indigenous training and work integrated education.
More than anything, and here the Canadian North is not doing particularly well, northern regions need to show real commitment and pride. They need to celebrate the uniqueness of their regions, including the valuable Indigenous cultures, and the commitment of the people, governments, and business to persisting in place.
Put simply, opportunity comes to those regions that want it the most and to those that do not wait for outsiders to determine their future. This approach has worked in remote regions as disperse as the Faroe Islands, Cape Verde off the west coast of Africa, and the Reunion Islands in the Indian Ocean. The North has real potential, but only a few areas have shown the resolve and creativity to seek sustained innovation-based economic possibilities.
As is so often over time, the economic future is defined by people, communities and regions that dream of a better future that is of their own creation. These areas take risks, go after opportunities and dare to imagine a great future. Economic prosperity does not belong to regions that expect other people and other levels of government to solve their problems and to guide them to a brighter economic future. The North has, in the words of political scientist Gurston Dacks, “a choice of futures.” North-driven economic development is the key to regional success.
Ken Coates is a distinguished fellow and director of Indigenous affairs at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
