Who’s North?

(This post, originally published in High North News, was inspired by the presence in the Arctic of significant numbers of Pammy Fleming‘s family, including great_4,5,6granddaughters in the Northwest Territories and Nunavik. Credit photo of Nunavut below: Peter Prokosch-Grid Arendal.)

It’s entirely a matter of degree. The North pole at 90°N (North latitude) is as far North as it gets on Earth. The treeline, beyond which trees don’t grow because of ice, snow and cold, is at 50°N in some places. Above 60°N the land is pretty well packed white all winter long. And it’s a long, dark winter.
To Americans, Canada is a Northern country because Canada lies North of the United States. The U.S.-Canada border dipsy-doodles around 49°N and below (Toronto is at 43°N, Montreal and Ottawa at 45°N). Most Canadians by far — more than nine out of ten — live within 100 miles or about 1.5° of this border. We hug our big neighbour very tightly. (This is true “even in the North,” as Brian Pehora wrote from Whitehorse, Yukon, after this article was first published. “About a 1/4 of ppl North of 60 live within a days drive of Alaska.”)
Canadians are a Northern people we say, guardians of the True North our anthem sings. We’re proud that the tiny hamlet of Alert at 82°N is the place furthest North on the planet that is continuously occupied. Alert’s motto, Inuit Nunangata, means beyond the land of Inuit land. The permanent population of Alert is zero, but there are always a few dozen people there on a rotating basis for weather and military signals monitoring and as a short-term destination for Northern researchers.
But the real truth is that most Canadians by far are a Northern people by reputation only.
Canada’s territory above 60°N measures 4,650,000 square kilometers (46% of Canada) and has a total population of 110,000, more than half aboriginal (about 50,000 Inuit and 15,000 other Indigenous peoples spread among dozens of nations, including Innu, Dene, Métis, Yellowknives, Tlingit, Yukon and Cree). Total GDP for the three Northern territories is just under $10 billion.
Alaska is North for the United States, the largest state in the union by area, with a population of about 750,000, largely employed in gas, oil and government, including the U.S. military, and a GDP of US $45 billion. I won’t belabour the Scandinavians: Helsinki, 1.5 million people at 60°N (all Finns live between 60°N and 70°N), Stockholm with 1.3 million and Oslo with 1.4 million, both at 59°N. Narvik, Norway, with 19,000 people, is situated just above 68°N.
But the real claimant to Northern pre-eminence is Siberia. At just over 13 million sq. km., approximately 10% of Earth’s total land area, Siberia is 77% of Russia, with a population of 40 million. There are big cities in Siberia. The regional admin centre Novosibirsk is at 55°N with more than 1.5 million inhabitants. The longest railway in the world is the Trans-Siberian.
Canada has no cities of any size above 55°N. Edmonton, with a population of 800,000, is at 53°N. North of Edmonton, stretching East and West from the Pacific to Hudson Bay and across to Labrador, you’d have to look hard to find a total of 250,000 people. About a quarter of these are at Fort McMurray (56°N) stripping the Alberta tarsands. Another 60,000 are in the territorial capitals of Yellowknife (60°N), Whitehorse (60°N) and Iqaluit (63°N). The rest are dispersed through dozens of settlements and communities, most with fewer than a thousand inhabitants.
On the other side of the pole a different North is found. Moscow, the Russian capital, sits at 55°N latitude with a population around 11.5 million. St. Petersburg, with five million people, is at 60°N. More than half the area of Russia is still further North, with cities such as Archangel, with 350,000 people at 64°N, Murmansk, with a population of 319,000 at 68°N, Vorcuta, with 75,000 Vorcutans at 67°N and Norilsk, 165,000 at 69°N. Canada has only three hamlets at this latitude, with a total of 1,182 residents.
What southern Canadians must understand is that there’s a lot more experience of the North around the world than we possess. And there’s the rub. Now the North is coming into its own. Now it is the focal point and early warning beacon for global climate change. Now international capital and technology are mobilizing to extract its almost limitless resources. Now shippers see an ice free passage open longer each year in the Northwest, with its promise of faster times and lower costs to move commodities between Asia and Europe. The benign neglect that has kept Canada’s North a private, undeveloped preserve won’t do for tomorrow. It’s high time to re-assess our interests in the North and to work in partnership with its Indigenous peoples.
The October 2013 Throne Speech boasted that, “Canada’s greatest dreams are to be found in our highest latitudes. They are the dreams of a North confident and prosperous.” That was a Conservative speech and the Conservative Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, was an annual visitor to the North, walking the talk as it were.
The current Liberal Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, hasn’t articulated any significant Northern policy, other than to somehow help Northern residents with the exceptionally high cost of living in lightly populated areas where most food and other supplies have to be flown in. This will no doubt be welcome relief, if and when it happens, but it’s hardly a policy, let alone a strategy. However Mr. Trudeau would hardly disagree with the sentiment, and might feasibly have used it himself if it hadn’t first come from the opposition, that “Canada’s greatest dreams are to be found in our highest latitudes.”
Great dreams perhaps. But do we really have any right to claim great doings?
Search as hard as you can, you won’t find more than $250 million spread over four or five years as evidence of “building the Canadian North,” federal money to be spent on everything from housing to adult education to species protection and harbor and hydro developments. To put that amount in context, it’s the same as was spent recently to renovate the Canadian Museum of Nature along the street from where I live in Ottawa. It’s a pittance in the scheme of Northern development.
Despite the woeful record, we have perfected talking the talk. “The Government of Canada has made the North one of its top priorities. Through our northern strategy, we are working to ensure Canada’s North achieves its full potential as a healthy, prosperous region within a strong and sovereign Canada.”
In response to this delusion, Yevgeny Lukyanov explains what is meant by walking the walk. “For the Russian economy, there are no alternatives for the majority of resources extracted in the North,” says the deputy secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation. “These resources provide Russia’s strategic security and will be a determining factor in lifting and modernizing its economy.”
The Russian Arctic produces 11% of the country’s GNP, 93% of its natural gas and 75% of its oil. A good deal of the infrastructure required to further exploit Russia’s Arctic is already in place. In support of resource development, a public-private partnership was concluded December 30, 2015, to build the world’s Northernmost railway, running 170 km Northeast from the Bovanenkovo gas field to the port of Sabetta on the Yamal Peninsula, which will be fully operational by 2016 to provide year-round facilities for vessels carrying goods and gas through the Northern Sea Route. “This project opens a window to the world oceans,” says Irina Sokolova, vice-governor of the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous District. “Its goal is to strengthen the power of Russia in the Arctic frontiers.”
Russia is actively promoting its Northern Sea Route as an alternative to the fabled but elusive Northwest Passage. In fact the most promising and to date the most used way through the Arctic hugs the Russian coast. The Northwest Passage through Canadian waters is narrower, shallower and has more ice.
Russia can deploy 41 icebreakers today and is building 14 more, many of them nuclear-powered. The largest is a 556-foot megaship, 42 feet longer than the next biggest and too big for any existing docks. The United States has only three, one of which has been out of service for repairs for five years. But the U.S. Coast Guard announced January 12, 2016, that it will purchase two new heavy breakers to support operations in the Arctic. They are expected to cost more than US$1 billion apiece and be able to break through ice six feet thick at a speed of three knots, operate for 80 days without refueling and cover about 40,000 kilometers at a speed of 12 knots in ice-free waters.
Canada’s Coast Guard has two decades-old icebreakers heavy enough for thick ice and two medium breakers, all powered by diesel-electric engines. The workhorse has been CCGS Louis S. St-Laurent, almost a half century old. It was due to be replaced next year (2017) by the $1.7 billion CCGS John G. Diefenbaker but this project, announced in 2008, has been repeatedly delayed. The earliest estimate now for the Diefenbaker’s deployment is 2022.
Russia has recently established six new military bases in the Arctic, two of them equipped with anti-aircraft missile systems, and is modernizing six Northern airfields. President Vladimir Putin has said that Russia doesn’t intend to militarize the Arctic but will protect its national interests in oil and gas and maintain an alert against terrorist activity in the region. Last year the largest building in the Arctic, a 14,000-square meter (151,000-square foot) military complex, was completed at Franz Joseph Land, an archipelago of 191 mostly uninhabited islands at 81°N (just 1° south of our Northernmost populated site at Alert).
“For the majority of Russians, the Arctic and everything connected to it is not an abstract concept or romantic exotica, but a practical and vitally important reality,” says Mr. Lukyanov.
For most southern Canadians it is precisely the reverse, a romantic vision, a place dreamed of but difficult to get to and hard to get a grip on. For Northerners and Northern Indigenous peoples, the North is vitally important. On their strength and on their leadership Canada must rely through the difficult Northern century ahead.
To secure this future internationally we must look to the Arctic Council.
The Council is a high-level intergovernmental forum “promoting cooperation, coordination and interaction among the Arctic states, Arctic Indigenous communities and other Arctic inhabitants on common Arctic issues, in particular on issues of sustainable development and environmental protection.” These objectives may either have been strengthened or exceeded last year with establishment of the Arctic Economic Council. The AEC was set up, under Canadian auspices, “as a primary forum for interaction between the Arctic Council and the circumpolar business community.”
The Arctic Council has no power. But it has influence. As the world’s awareness grows of the Arctic’s economic riches and climate risks, that influence is bound to increase. Nobody knows the North better.
As well as Canada, the U.S and Russia, members of the Council include Denmark (pop. 5.6 million), Finland (5.5 million), Iceland (pop. 329,000), Norway (5 million) and Sweden (9.6 million). Membership is open only to nations with territory extending into the Arctic. Many others would like to be involved. Eight European states and China, Japan, South Korea and Singapore have status as Observers and participate in Council working groups. The European Union would like to be an Observer too but has been blackballed by Canada in retaliation for its Brigitte Bardot-inspired ban on seal products. There are also six organizations representing Indigenous peoples throughout the Arctic designated as Permanent Participants of the Council.
All together, the six members of the Council that are not superpowers have a total population lower than California plus Texas. We are never going to outmuscle the giants. But we have a three-to-one voting majority. This will increase in importance as the Council’s authority grows, as surely it will. Outriders will want to get closer to Arctic action. Why is this inevitable? Some non-members of the Council assert that the Arctic belongs to those who have most use for it as well as those who claim sovereignty.
Qu Tanzhou, director of the Chinese Arctic and Antarctic Administration, told an interviewer from the Globe and Mail in January 2014, “Arctic resources, in my opinion, will be allocated according to the needs of the world, not only owned by certain countries. We cannot simply say that this is yours and this is mine.” China has two icebreakers and is expected to commission another this year.
Canada can continue to lead the Arctic Council and solicit the support of non-members, such as China and the European Union, in a new alignment to fulfill the North’s economic potential. We must boost investment in social and economic infrastructure, not by small amounts but by billions.
Above all, the common cause must be to revive and amplify Indigenous strength in the Arctic.
Southern Canadians can rely on their Northern compatriots to hold the North. They won’t hold it alone. But they will be the core, the backbone, of Canadian control in the Arctic. Without them we’ll be frozen out of competition in what is fast becoming a most important focal point of global concern (climate) and interest (resources), in our own backyard.
John Diefenbaker raised the level of Northern consciousness by championing a “roads to resources” vision. But Dief’s program dwindled to nothing during his brief and troubled time in office. Now sixty years later, the time has arrived to do more than walk and talk. Nickel and diming one of the vastest underdeveloped territories of the world is a loser’s strategy. Use it or lose it, China has told us, politely. We should be listening carefully.

2014 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,000 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 33 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Prince of publishers

Jack McClelland never stopped trolling for material he could publish and he had a marvelously seductive line. “That would make a great book,” he’d say to just about any rational thought. “Tony’s book.”
Who would know better than The Canadian Publisher^TM himself?
That’s how he lured Pammy’s great₃grandson. Every time Jack talked about “Tony’s book” it moved closer to a work-in-progress and after a while it was, though very much part-time as to work and haphazard as to progress. Nobody who writes for money in Canada is unaware of the perils of the book trade for the author.
But then, at 11 a.m. on May 18, 1985, after Tony pulled his robe tight and opened the door just wide enough to get the Globe and reach in the mailbox, there was an envelope. Bond paper, executive stock. At the kitchen table he propped it against the toaster, poured coffee, lit a JPS and stared at it awhile. It was from Toronto. Tony had been living almost ten years in Ottawa.
Inside, neatly-typed, was a three page letter from Jack, The Canadian Publisher.
Dear Tony:
“I finished reading your manuscript on the weekend and have been brooding about it ever since. It is a very thoughtful document. My initial reaction was that if we could get this out quickly, it would give Canadians a lot of food for thought before the next election. That might still be feasible…”
[There followed some random observations about possible libel, some argument about interpretation and a good deal of f-based vocabulary, leaving it largely unreproducible in a family journal.]
“I am passing the manuscript today to Linda, our new President. I am giving her a copy of this letter and a note saying, Linda, I think this has to be treated at the top level very urgently…
“This, then, is an interim response indicating that I at least think it is a manuscript worth very, very serious attention.
“Best personal regards.”
“Sincerely,
Jack”
It had taken a year to write, compiled on CBM 8096 microcomputer — a souped up Commodore 64 — and stored on floppy disk. What had hit Jack’s desk ten days earlier was an original printout, double spaced, margins justified, spellchecked, not a single typo in all 75,000 words, a publisher’s dream.
More than once Jack had proclaimed his belief in “Tony’s book.” Now Tony had delivered and, with his enthusiastic response, Tony saw the fall round of public affairs interviews and bookstore signings, the world unfolding as it should. Not for him the trauma of Canadian authors like Ian Adams, whose last book was withdrawn from the market by one publisher, who saw 22,000 paperback copies trashed when another went into receivership after being warned off by the RCMP, and who had to admit to a Globe and Mail reporter, “I have written six books and still can’t find a publisher in this country.” Not only did Tony have a publisher, Tony had the publisher who mattered most. The Canadian Publisher.

The Canadian Publisher

Three days after Jack’s reply another letter arrived, from Linda McKnight, the new president of McClelland and Stewart (M&S). She was in the throes of corporate reorganization and the fall sales conference was just two weeks away. She wrote that she was asking for “a fast and thorough appraisal of the manuscript by a senior editor, with comments made by Jack and yourself in your correspondence in mind” but cautioned that “possibly the best interests of the book and you as a writer would be served by not rushing it through but taking the time required to get it in the best possible shape.”
Tony could live with that and called Linda to say, “I’m happy to leave it in your hands and I look forward to hearing from your editor.” Less than three weeks later Toivo, a senior editor, phoned. Things were moving along just as you might expect at Canada’s premier publishing house. Tony congratulated himself for his foresight in seeking Jack out seven years earlier.
On a Friday afternoon he had gone to the hotel room where The Canadian Publisher was conducting business while in The Nation’s Capital. Jack was very bullish on the prospects for “Tony’s book ” at that first meeting, and very creative. “That’s a great idea,” Jack said of the idea Tony had brought, then rapidly demolished it as unpublishable. Would never work in the Canadian market – “infinitesimal for this kind of stuff no matter how important it is” – and certainly not at this time. He had a better idea. “Write a spy thriller,” he said. “That’s where the money is.”
“A thriller?” Tony had written millions of words of journalism over twenty years for magazines, newspapers and broadcasting networks in Canada and around the world. His few early attempts at fiction were never sold and long forgotten.
“You can do it,” said Canada’s most important publisher. “Think one up and send me an outline.” On his own Tony would never have thought of attempting any such thing but Jack’s confidence that it could be so easily done bolstered him. Before the meeting was over Tony was thinking, “Why not try?”
He wrote a five page outline that involved filthy-rich Arabs, sex-drugged entertainers, power-hungry politicians and a conspiracy to control the global flow of information. It was extreme. Jack thought it was great. He asked for some sample chapters. Tony was prepared to invest a little time in a learning experience. He took a month to do some research and write 10,000 words.
“Very promising,” said Jack and passed the work along to his chief editor at the time, Anna Porter. She asked to see some more. Tony did another 10,000 words.
“It’s coming along nicely,” said Anna, who thought the sex scenes were particularly well done. “But the sample chapters are not consecutive and I’m not sure how they will be linked together. Could you fill in the front section so that I can picture it a little more clearly?”

Anna Porter

Another 10,000 words would finish almost half the novel, called The Tonga Contract, after three months of work at the National Library of Canada. Bridget dropped Tony off each morning to work at the steaming potboiler all day, surrounded by scholars, students and speechwriters immersed in weighty research. She picked him up in the evening and typed his handwritten pages at night on the Xerox 800 word processor they had in the office at home. (They had acquired it to process the thousands of letters they mailed each year to invite participation in Ottawa and provincial capitals at meetings of The Response Group.)
Working with a word processor and later with a computer vastly improved the speed of revising text and reorganizing the manuscript. It was a matter of wonder to him that anyone had ever finished a book without one. Still, it had been a long time spinning out this dream that Jack had, “Tony’s book” of lurid and dangerous intrigue. There had been no talk yet of contract, let alone an advance. Two weeks after mailing the third instalment Tony trekked to Toronto to get down to business.
“I’ve read it all through again. I think we might have a bestseller,” said Anna as she and Jack and Tony met in her office. “The best market will probably be in paperback in the U.S. I’ll query some New York houses about a simultaneous deal here and there.”
“Great,” Tony said. “Can we talk about money?”
Jack said nothing. Anna said she’d think about it but first she had some reservations about the depth of descriptive detail in certain episodes and would like to see a little more evidence of ability at scene setting.
“How much evidence?”
“Ten thousand words should be ample.”
But Tony didn’t have another month to donate to the project. The mortgage needed paying and the kids needed feeding and the bank showed little confidence in his prospect of forming a troika with Robert Ludlum and Frederick Forsythe. Tony decided it was the better part of prudence to cut-and-retreat to a real working world where effort was rewarded with income. The next time he tackled a book, Tony promised himself, if ever there’s a next time, which he very much doubted, he would do it differently. He put the half-done manuscript away.
It was five years later, 1985, that Tony finished The Response Group File. It wasn’t fiction but a lot closer to the idea he had originally brought to Jack. The book built on hundreds of hours of discussion with elected, appointed and self-designated leaders in Victoria, Edmonton, Calgary Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City, Fredericton and Halifax. It dealt with how the rules of the Canadian game are manipulated to the advantage of very few and why everything is bigger in Canada than elsewhere. Bigger government, with 20% of the labour force in public service. Bigger big business — proportionally about four times more concentrated than in the U.S.
“This can be a very powerful book,” Jack wrote. “There is much that you say in it that is important but it needs more organization…”
That’s the beauty of having it on computer, Tony thought. Reorganization is a breeze.
“The material should be of interest to a broad constituency of Canadians.”
By this time Anna had left The Canadian Publisher to start her own publishing house.
“It also needs the attention of a meticulous editor although you write very well.”
Enter Toivo, a meticulous senior editor. Toivo talked to Jack. Toivo talked to Tony. It didn’t take long to agree that the principal focus of the book should be the extraordinary control over the lives of Canadians exercised by a few giant institutions that dominate the decision-making process. Toivo was about to leave for a brief vacation in his native New York. He would take the manuscript with him and work on it there, ready to meet with me on his return to organize the final push on a manuscript to be ready for publication in the spring.
Back from his holiday in mid-August, Toivo met Tony in his M&S office, where Jack waved in passing, then over lunch at the Four Seasons. For five hours they talked about what should stay in the book, what should be reserved for a sequel and what didn’t belong. They talked about tone, whether it was a story best told in the first person or more objectively. They talked about the title. Toivo didn’t much like The Response Group File. It didn’t mean anything if you hadn’t been there. Tony suggested First Canadian. Better, said Toivo, much better. Tony flew back from Toronto to prepare an outline showing how the manuscript would be re-organized. As soon as it was in hand, The Canadian Publisher would proceed to a contract.
“We need to talk contract,” said Toivo. “What did you have in mind?”
“It costs about five thousand a month to keep everything going.”
“How long do you think it will take?”
“Three months.”
“Fifteen thousand dollar advance against royalties?”
“That’s about right.”
“Doesn’t sound at all unreasonable,” said Toivo. “I’ll talk to Linda and Jack.”
The advance wouldn’t be a problem.
Within a week the outline was done and Tony sent along a rewritten chapter as well, a bonus made easy by computer power. Editorial meetings were held on Wednesdays. Toivo called late Wednesday afternoon. “I’m afraid I have some discouraging news.”
“Oh?”
“I haven’t been able to get the point across to the people here. They want to see a little more reorganization.”
“How much more?”
“Two chapters.”
Tony bit his tongue. “OK I guess. With the micro I can redo two in a week or two.”
“I know you can but there’s something else.”
“What?”
“I’m leaving to take a job in New York. From now on you’ll be dealing with Jan Walter, the director of publishing.”
“Has she read it?”
“No.”
It was early September and Jan was the fourth handler since Jack’s warm welcome in May. Over the next ten days Tony rewrote the chapters and mailed them on a Friday. That would give Jan something to chew on. Something to think about. Something to send a cheque for.
A week later Tony called Toronto. “Your package arrived this morning,” said Jan. “I haven’t had a chance to look at it.”
Another week. The director of publishing didn’t call, didn’t respond to messages. Tony couldn’t think why — refused to think the unthinkable — until late in the last week of September as Tony sipped his first coffee of the day and unfolded the Globe. There in black and white his putative publisher was staring up at him from Page One. The Canadian Publisher, it was reported, was eyeball to eyeball with bankruptcy. He didn’t have the cash to print his fall list, let alone support development of future titles. The Ontario Development Corporation was being asked to convert $3 million in loans into shares in the company. The provincial cabinet was considering a million dollar bailout. The biggest of the Big Five banks and a group of private investors, including Jack’s more prosperous authors, were being canvassed for another million or so, to be held in preferred stock that could be converted later to common. Jack owned eighty percent of his company, which was $5 million in the hole. It was enough to drive a man to drink.
The press was complaining that he couldn’t be reached but the M&S switchboard operator put Tony’s call right through and Jack answered. His voice trembled and the tension was palpable as he spoke quickly. The bailout hadn’t been approved by cabinet yet. He expected word any minute, that afternoon. He had been too caught up with financial negotiations to follow the progress of Tony’s manuscript. He would ask Jan to call back. If Tony was coming to Toronto, Jack would like to take him to lunch.
They both understood the irony. Tony’s book featured the emergence of government as the bank of last resort for business. Jack’s story could now reasonably be added, a natural chapter eleven. The fate of Tony’s book, which by now had consumed “more than five percent of my adult life” as he said that night to Bridget, was in the balance. No bailout, no book.
Within days there was excellent news. The house that Jack built had been saved, at least for the moment, by a healthy infusion of public funds. Tony resolved to press for a conclusion. On the last Sunday of the month he bought a VIA Rail economy ticket and boarded the train for T.O., determined to wrest a favourable decision. Tony had a place to stay with a friend in the Republic of Rathnelly and would continue revising for as long as he had to wait.
Jack wasn’t in the office Monday morning. Tony left a message and another for Jan. Jack called back. He was at home, exhausted, wrung-out by the hard bargaining with banks and bureaucrats and the nerve-wracking, last-millisecond rescue. He was taking time off to recover. He asked me to call again in a week.
Then Jan called. “You’ve been reading about our troubles in the press. We’re not in a position to offer a fifteen thousand dollar advance.”
“I thought the government had solved your money problems.”
“That may clear up the debt. It hasn’t given us any more to operate with. Things are very tight. We can’t think of that kind of advance.”
“What kind of advance can you think of?”
“I’m not sure. Let me think about it. I’ll drop you a note.”
“Send it by courier,” Tony said, giving the address on Rathnelly.
Jack wasn’t in the office next Monday morning. Tony reached him at home in Kleinburg, the wealthy enclave of artists and others north of Toronto, home of the justly famed McMichael Canadian Art Collection. They agreed to meet for lunch on Friday in the Prince Arthur Room of the Park Plaza. That afternoon Jan’s letter was hand delivered. In it she noted that much of the content of First Canadian drew on the events of the past few years. She would like to see another outline that looked forward. She didn’t mention an advance.

Jan Walter

On the phone she was not warm. “First we’ll need the outline,” she said, “then we might put up two thousand.”
“That’s not acceptable,” Tony said. He knew he was watching a year-and-a-half, the original work, two revisions, a hundred thousand hard words, tilt slowly into a crater.
“It’s the best we can do.”
“That’s ridiculous. Six weeks ago fifteen thousand wasn’t unreasonable.”
“The situation has changed.”
“Have you talked to Jack and Linda about this?”
“Not yet.”
“I’m having lunch with Jack on Friday,” Tony said. “I’d appreciate it if you’d talk to Linda before then and get back to me.”
“I’ll try.”
The Canadian Publisher wasn’t at the Park Plaza yet but Tony was shown to Jack’s usual table by the wall-length windows where he would be framed and highly visible to everyone in the restaurant as well as passersby on Prince Arthur Street. He loped in just a few minutes later, loudly greeting Jack Godfrey and Irving Grundman, who were seated together quietly conspiring. Loud gossip at the next table quickly refocused to the M&S bailout.
The waiter brought Jack a martini. “I’ve been taking too many of these in the last while,” he said. “I’m going to stop drinking on Sunday, for good.” He was 53 years of age and it didn’t sound as if he meant it, more as if he often quit for good on Sundays.
Tony said he had stopped two years before. We are all alcoholic in our family, or nearly all, he confided. Alcoholism is genetic, at least in part, Tony said. It certainly runs in families.
“My father never took a drink in his life,” said Jack.
“That doesn’t mean much,” Tony said. “If you never drink you never know whether you’re alcoholic or not. The only way you find out is by taking to drink.”
“I used to give it up for a month twice a year,” said Jack. “But now I find it takes most of the month just to get feeling well again.”
Jack had Jan’s letter with him. “I’m not really sure what this means,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on.” Tony told him about the meetings, the correspondence, the calls back and forth, the revisions, the outlines, the fresh thoughts, the most recent offer.
“I’ve been out of touch with all of this,” said Jack, “totally preoccupied with the financial thing. And I have to be very careful about intervening because I’ve given Linda full authority. I still own eighty percent but if I swing my weight I’ll undermine her.
“On the other hand,” he went on, “Linda and Jan don’t know the details of the new deal yet. I’ve been at Kleinburg since it closed. This meeting is the first I’ve had in two weeks. Also, we have a new director of sales who has just joined the company. I know that he hasn’t had a chance to look at this yet. I’ll tell you what, we’ll call them after lunch. One or the other will be there. You know I’ve always believed in Tony’s book. I’m sure we can work something out.”
Tony felt better than he had in a long while. The waiter brought Jack another martini. They ordered lunch.
As they ate Jack spoke about the bailout. The crisis had erupted suddenly when book sales unexpectedly took a nosedive. But negotiations had actually started two years earlier when Jack went to Bill Davis, the Ontario premier, with a proposition. The government already had a large stake in the company through loans advanced or guaranteed at the bank.
“If anything happens to me,” Jack said to the premier, “your government will have to deal with my wife and kids. If you should leave office, I don’t know who I’ll have to contend with. We should get the financing straightened away. How about swapping debt for equity?”
The premier agreed to talk but negotiations dragged on, with government, with investors, with banks, over months and months and a year, then two. The biggest barrier was the Big Five bank which held The Canadian Publisher’s account. Its participation in any refinancing was essential. But these were hardnosed banking days, so flinty that the prime minister himself had been moved to entreat banks to “take a chance on Canadians.” Jack’s business was not made of the bricks and mortar that gave most comfort to bankers. It seemed to rely more on creative hunch than product planning and development. He couldn’t persuade the bank’s account managers and he couldn’t circumvent them.
Then he got lucky. At a formal dinner in Montreal he ran into the bank’s chief executive. “You’re impossible to reach,” Jack said. “I’ve called a dozen times.”
“You need a code word to be sure to get through,” the chairman said. “If it’s really important, use this.” He gave Jack the code.
When Jack called the next month it was really important. The bank’s investment committee had just turned down The Canadian Publisher’s restructuring proposal, queering the rescue package carefully crafted with the province over two years. The CEO was away on vacation. Jack said the code word.
The CEO called the next day, not happy. “What the hell do you mean coming after me on my holidays? I can’t do anything about this. The decision’s been made.”
Jack paddled desperately. He said the decision had been made on numbers only. He said it was more than a numbers decision. It was public relations. The Canadian Publisher’s company was an important name in Canada. It wouldn’t look good for the bank to send it over the falls just as the government was tossing a lifeline. It wasn’t the strongest argument to give a banker but Jack asked the CEO at least to review the file.
“I haven’t got the file.”
Jack called the bank, used the code word again, and asked that the file be sent.
A day later the CEO reversed the committee but pointedly told Jack never again to interrupt his vacation. Jack didn’t know if the code word had ever been changed. He hadn’t called since.
When he went to pay for lunch Jack discovered his Diner’s Club card was missing. He signed the cheque then led me to the row of pay phones in the mini-lobby outside the dining room in the northeast corner of the hotel. Tony suddenly felt that this was a well practiced routine, the lunch, the call, the talk of a deal, all very agreeable. Pre-arranged. The way to do business as publishing should be done, creatively, would naturally be to do it when the office was supposed to be closed, from a pay phone at the Park Plaza. Jack dropped a quarter and waited an interminable minute before anyone answered. It was his daughter. She went to get Jan while Jack explained that the office was actually closed on Friday afternoons, but the director of publishing would be there. After a long wait Jan took the line. Jack said he was with me, we had talked at lunch. He passed the phone and immediately reached for another to try to locate his missing Diner’s card.
Jan said she had talked to Linda. They still wanted a new outline. If they liked what they saw two thousand dollars was the best offer they could make. No guarantees. For the first three chapters following the outline, they might advance another three thousand. She stressed “might”. Tony said he would give his answer to Jack.
“What do you think Jack?”
“I think we’ve made an offer you can’t accept. You can’t afford to.”
“That’s what I think too.”
The eighty percent shareholder explained once more why he couldn’t intervene in publishing decisions, even though he’d like to in this case. “If I do it once it will never stop. But I’ll be talking to Linda on the weekend. There are developments on the financing side that she’s not aware of. Leave it with me.” Tony had been two weeks in Toronto. He hated to leave without resolving the question. But he agreed to wait for a call on Monday.
Jack couldn’t budge them, he said when he called. There were now so many revisions and versions of who said what to whom and when, that the early spontaneous commitment had dissipated. It wasn’t that they didn’t want Tony’s book. Jack still believed in it. But he didn’t run the company any longer. He just owned it.
Tony asked Jan whether she had read the original manuscript.
“No. By the time I got involved we were looking for a new book.”
“I hope you find one,” Tony said. “Please send mine back.”
When it arrived by courier the next day he put it, unopened, on the shelf next to the dual disk drive that was the heart of the microcomputer’s memory. Tony recalled an incident from the week before at the Park Plaza. He had with him a copy of a best-selling biography published by M&S. Noticing it Jack said, “That one made a lot of money.”
Tony turned the cover to show the author’s dedication. “With affection and gratitude for my friend and mentor, Jack McClelland, the Canadian Publisher.”
“Really,” said Jack. “I never noticed that.”

Northern summer: endless days, riotous nature

Caribou crossing near Old Crow, the Yukon’s most isolated village.

Summer in the North is short and sweet with riotous nature in bloom and joyous people at play through endless days. I get to Yellowknife now and then. Pammy has a great₄granddaughter there, Danica, and her partner Jerry. A few years back Danica’s sister, Kerrin, was the mukluk annie running the Wildcat Cafe, the original watering hole for pioneer arctic pilots that was replicated and featured at Canada’s busiest museum, Civilization, when we had one (it has since been reformatted and renamed the Museum of History). Kerrin is in Umiujaq now, with her Inuk foster daughter, teaching school. But that’s another story. This one is about summer in the territories.
Yellowknife, beside the deepest lake in North America, Great Slave, built on a billion-year old geological thrust of rock and gold and diamonds, is the capital of the Northwest Territories and centre of summerland in the North. Not the geographic centre but the primary jumping off point for tourists and adventurers. This trip I was hanging mostly in town, where the start of the season is particularly vibrant. When I mentioned the visit to my friend Barbara, she posted, “I envy your opportunity to be in Yellowknife for the summer solstice! I have fond memories of many a summer solstice party in Old Town.”
Old Town. Within an hour of sighting the Giant Mine headframe that marks the airway in, I was on Ragged Ass Road heading there again. There’s a patio on the Wildcat. That’s new. But it’s been more than a few years since I’ve been back. On the whole the Knife looks much the same. Hard for much that’s new to take root here. It’s a government town. But it’s on the frontier, as far north as you can get to easily from most places in Canada. Easier from Ottawa than most and easier now than before.
One thing new in town is the Northern Lighthouse Project, five beacons strategically located and wired to flash colours on atmospheric conditions. Four feet tall and styled “Japanese lanterns” by the locals, they glow red for a possible geomagnetic storm that carries the likelihood of the fabulous northern lights, seen most vividly in Yellowknife and the primary draw for tens of thousands of Asian tourists who come to town to gaze in awe at the splendour of aurora borealis. Not in summer though. If you live here you might see an aurora or two around midnight in summer, but it’s not prime time for these spectaculars. That would be in the dark of winter. Seasons in the North are defined by light. It’s light for 18-20 hours a day in summer; dark for the same time in winter. The balance favours the summer because Yellowknife has more sunshine each year than anywhere in B.C., Ontario, Quebec, or the Maritimes.
Summer in the territories is all about fishing, paddling, photography, bird watching, fly-in trips to remote camps. The adventurous canoe trekkers who brave the South Nahanni River gather and outfit in Yellowknife for the flight to the land of the Dene at Virginia Falls. Over the years, quite a few people have perished in these hazardous waters, named a national park after Pierre Trudeau first saw and mastered them in 1972. My niece survived an attenuated version forty years later, so it’s no longer death-defying, and the Nahanni is just one of ten great rivers that host expeditions up to 28 days long. Of course, there are many less daunting canoe routes out of the Knife – from a one-day trip to Tartan Rapids on the Yellowknife River to a five day wilderness trip for advanced paddlers. Five national parks and 34 territorial parks are accessible by road. It’s wild, wonderful, unspoiled and largely uninhabited, with unique sounds and sights of pristine land, water and vegetation as well as the birds and beasts that thrive there. Ravens and ptarmigan are indigenous favourites but there are more than 200 species of birds in the area and hundreds of thousands waterfowl breed and feed in the Slave River delta. Scheduled tours leave the Knife to encounter the great caribou migration in mid-summer or to mingle with muskox anytime in the barrenlands of the far North. These jaunts cost several thousand dollars a head. On the other hand, you could meet a herd of bison for free on just about any road or trail.
Old Town is the hub of city culture, “where Yellowknife’s gold mining past meets its creative present,” as the brochure says. Crafts from weaving and Inuit carving to glass etching and fur products rub shoulders with B&Bs, cafés, boat launching and the seaplane port. There’s probably no better locale in the country to find traditionally tanned moose and caribou hides, beaded, fur-trimmed and fashioned into gloves, dresses and moccasins. Many young men wear embroidered jackets. It’s a young person’s town, average age 32.
If you’re here for the first time and want a quick fix on the people, wildlife and geology of the place, you’ll find it all laid out in story and artifact at the Northern Heritage Centre. Five minutes stroll away and just down the hill if you stay at the historic Explorer, a hotel my wife and I once had entirely to ourselves when the staff took a surprise Christmas break, is the Northern Frontier Visitors Centre, where can be found everything there is to know about goings-on in town and where bicycles are on loan (no charge) for day trips.
Every month has its festivals, races, tournaments. The go-to event each week in summer is the outdoor food and crafts market on Tuesday evenings at the civic plaza in front of City Hall. It starts with a gong at 17:30 sharp and runs officially until 19:00, though the day I was there the chicken byriani was all gone by 17:45.
There’s much more to say and books have been written about Canada’s North and why Canadians should know it better. One reason more of us don’t know it better is because it hasn’t been easy to get to. For all the time we’ve had family up there, about a quarter century, the way in was through Edmonton. Fly to Edmonton by Air Canada or Westjet, sit for hours around the airport, then on to Yellowknife, and the same way back. It wasn’t convenient and it wasn’t cheap.
Now along comes a brash alternative. Air North has been in business for 37 years from its base in Whitehorse, capital of the Yukon Territory. For new Canadians and those who haven’t learned their geography, the Yukon is about one-third the size and immediately to the west of the Northwest Territories, of which I write, and much the same things can be said about it. Air North connects Whitehorse with turboprops to towns throughout the Yukon and Northwest Territories and, with Boeing 737s configured for plush single-class seating, to Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton as well as Yellowknife and Ottawa. It’s the only scheduled airline whose founder and CEO, Joe Sparling, is also an active 737 Captain.
For the first time this summer, Air North is running a new route, non-stop and direct from Ottawa to Yellowknife. It doesn’t go often, just twice a week on Monday and Friday. But it gets there in half the time (four hours) and appears to cost about 20% less, insofar as one can decipher air fares. The flight jumps on from Yellowknife to Whitehorse, a first for that link as well. Return flights to Ottawa run on Sundays and Thursdays.
There have always been particularly tight ties between the territories and the nation’s capital. For most of the 20th century, until Yellowknife got the job in 1967, the Northwest Territories was governed directly from Ottawa. There are more Inuit living here than in any other southern city (every place is south seen from the North) and more in town temporarily for medical or other assistance, or for schooling. It’s a link we should be glad to strengthen, something they feel even more strongly in the North.
There are no roads into Old Crow 500 miles due north of Whitehorse near the Alaska border. You can get there by boat in summer or snowmobile in winter but by air is the only sure way year round. The Vuntut Gwitchin who live there, a community of about 300 people, think isolation is a blessing because it lets them preserve their language and traditional pursuits such as fishing, trapping and particularly hunting the massive Porcupine caribou herd, a hunt they have mastered over centuries. Nevertheless, connecting with the rest of us has always been high on the Vuntut Gwitchin agenda. After concluding a land claim deal with the feds in 1995, they decided to buy an airline. A share of Air North was available because Captain Sparling wanted funds in order to buy 737s to expand service between Whitehorse and Vancouver and intitiate it to points east, first to Alberta in 2002, now Ontario.
At least in part, Ottawa’s improved link to the North comes via investment by this tiny First Nation. And more, if the bright night of Yellowknife is too much metropolis for the North you envision, and Whitehorse even more so, know that Old Crow near the top of the land is just a flip away, with flights in and a warm welcome every day but Saturday.

Food and learning under northern lights, Part 4/4 True North

Where is North?
It’s a matter of direction and degree. The north pole at 90⁰N (north latitude) is as far north as it gets on earth. The treeline, beyond which trees don’t grow because of ice, snow and cold, is at 50⁰N in some places. Above 60⁰ the land is pretty well all frozen all winter long.
To Americans, Canada is a northern country because it runs north of the United States. The U.S.-Canada border dipsy-doodles around 49⁰N and below (Toronto is at 43⁰N, Montreal and Ottawa at 45⁰N). Most Canadians by far — more than nine out of ten — live within 100 miles or about 1.5⁰ of this border. We hug our big neighbour very tightly.
Canadians are a northern people we say, guardians of the True North our anthem sings. We’re proud that the tiny hamlet of Alert at 82⁰N is the place furthest north on the planet that is continuously occupied. Alert’s motto, Inuit Nunangata, means beyond the land of the Inuit. The permanent population of Alert is zero but there are always a few dozen people there on a rotating basis because it’s a weather and military signals monitoring station and a short-term destination for northern researchers. Umiujaq, where Pammy’s great₄granddaughter Kerrin and her Inuk foster daughter live, is just above 56⁰N.
But the real truth is we’re a northern people in name only.
Our North measures 4,650,000 square kilometers (46% of Canada) and has a total population of 110,000, more than half aboriginal (about 50,000 Inuit and 15,000 other indigenous peoples, including Dene, Metis and Cree.)
The North for the United States, Alaska, is the largest state in the union by area, with a population of about 750,000, just 15% aboriginal, largely employed in gas, oil and government, including the U.S. military. Disconnected from the lower 48, Alaska lies mainly between 60⁰N and 70⁰N.
I won’t belabour Helsinki, 1.5 million people at 60⁰N (all of Finland’s 5.5 million people live between 60⁰N and 70⁰N), Stockholm with 1.3 million and Oslo with 1.4 million at 59⁰N, Narvik, Norway with 19,000 people just above 68⁰N.
But the real rival claimant to northern pre-eminence is Siberia. At just over 13 million km², approximately 10% of earth’s total land area, Siberia is 77% of Russia, with a population of 40 million. Very few (~6%) are indigenous, although some Mongols and Tatars were Siberian before the onslaught of Russia started in the 16^th century. There are big cities in Siberia. The regional admin centre Novosibirsk is at 55⁰N with more than 1.5 million inhabitants.The longest railway in the world is the Trans-Siberian.
Canada has no cities of any size above 55⁰N. Edmonton, with a population of 800,000, is at 53⁰N. North of Edmonton, stretching east and west from the Pacific to Hudson Bay, you’d have to look hard to find a total of 250,000 people, whites and Inuit together. About a quarter of these are at Fort McMurray (56⁰N) stripping the Alberta tar sands. Another 60,000 are pushing paper and serving drinks to tourists in the territorial capitals of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories (60⁰N), Whitehorse in the Yukon (60⁰N) and Iqaluit in Nunavut (63⁰N). The rest are dispersed through dozens of settlements and traditional villages, most with fewer than a thousand inhabitants. Nunavut, carved from the Northwest Territories in 1999, has the most land and the least people of all 13 provinces and territories. In an area larger than all but the biggest dozen of the 249 countries in the world, including Canada itself, there are just 32,000 people, more than four out of five of them Inuit. There were 445 people in Umiujaq when Kerrin arrived in 2011. Umiujaq is one of 14 villages in Quebec’s northern territory of Nunavik, with a total population of just over 12,000 of whom 90% are Inuit. Nunavik is tiny beside Nunavut but larger than California.
On the other side of the pole a different North is found. Moscow, the capital of all the Russians, sits at 55⁰N latitude, with a population around 11.5 million. St. Petersburg, with five million people, is at 60⁰N. More than half the area of Russia is still further North, with cities such as Archangel, with 350,000 people at 64⁰N, Murmansk, with a population of 319,000 at 68⁰N, Vorcuta, with 75,000 Vorcutans at 67⁰N and Norilsk, 165,000 at 69⁰N. Canada has only three hamlets at this latitude, with a total of 1,182 mainly Inuit residents.
There’s a lot more experience of the North around the world than Canada is any part of. Canada’s North is lightly occupied, scarcely developed and virtually unknown to Canadians themselves, Inuit excepted. We just have lucked into a huge slice of the planet that the rest of the world hasn’t had any use for until now.
And there’s the rub. Now the North is coming into its own. Now it is the focal point and early warning beacon for global climate change. Now international capital and technology are mobilizing to extract its almost limitless resources. Now shippers see an ice free passage open longer each year in the northwest, with its promise of faster times and lower costs to move commodities between Asia and Europe. The benign neglect that has kept the pride of Canada a private preserve won’t do for tomorrow. It is time to re-assess our interests in the North and the rights of its original people, the Inuit.
The Throne Speech of October 2013 boasted that, “Canada’s greatest dreams are to be found in our highest latitudes. They are the dreams of a North confident and prosperous.”
Do we really have any right to such a claim? Not judged by our accomplishments. A current prime example is the final extension of the Dempster Highway, which starts near Dawson in the Yukon and runs 736 km across the Arctic Circle to Inuvik in the Northwest Territories. This was part of Prime Minister Diefenbaker’s northern vision. He got the all-season road underway in 1958 when he was in office but high cost and disputes between Ottawa and the Yukon made it very much a start-and-stop project that took 21 years to get to Inuvik. The vision dimmed as Dief did. It wasn’t until 2013 that construction started on the 140 km link from Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk, a project half a century in the talking stage.
That’s the big one. But “building the Canadian North is an essential part of building our nation” are the first words of Canada’s northern strategy, introduced by the present government of Canada in 2007, so of course there are some other initiatives.
Rangers are a particular pride of the Inuit community. Some of the strongest young leaders become Rangers. There are 5,000 Rangers. Note the number. It’s about 10% of the Inuit population. Not entirely a coincidence. Rangers are important to the Inuit and the hundreds of communities through the North where they live. They are role models and their patrols through remote communities and areas serve a number of ends. Sovereignty is among them, but search and rescue or emergency assistance are more practical and better appreciated. They have no real military role. Ten days of orientation is all that’s required to train new Rangers. They are each employed a few weeks each year. Their 60-year old Lee Enfield rifles were supposed to be replaced last fall (2013), but that upgrade has been postponed by at least three years.
Search as hard as you can, you won’t find as much as $250 million spread over four or five years as evidence of this “building our nation”, money to be spent on everything from housing to adult education to species protection and harbour and hydro developments. To put that amount in context, it’s what was spent recently to renovate the Canadian Museum of Nature on the street where I live in Ottawa.
We have talking the talk down perfectly, despite the woeful record. “The Government of Canada has made the North one of its top priorities. Through our northern strategy, we are working to ensure Canada’s North achieves its full potential as a healthy, prosperous region within a strong and sovereign Canada.”
In response to this persiflage, Yevgeny Lukyanov, the deputy secretary of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, explains what’s meant by walking the walk. “For the Russian economy, there are no alternatives for the majority of resources extracted in the North,” he says. “These resources provide Russia’s strategic security and will be a determining factor in lifting and modernizing its economy.” The Russian Arctic produces 11% of the country’s GNP, 93% of its natural gas and 75% of its oil. A good deal of the infrastructure required to further exploit Russia’s Arctic is already in place. Russia is actively promoting its northern sea route as an alternative to the fabled but elusive Northwest Passage.
“For the majority of Russians, the Arctic and everything connected to it is not an abstract concept or romantic exotica, but a practical and vitally important reality,” says Lukyanov. For most Canadians it is precisely the reverse, a romantic vision, a place dreamed of but difficult to get to. Most but not all. For the Canadian Inuit the North indeed is vitally important. This is their home as it has been through millennia. These magnificent people alone have the skill of survival at the frozen edge of existence. On their strength Canada must rely through the difficult northern century ahead.
But let’s be serious. There are 50,000 Inuit in a land bigger than India, which has 1.2 billion people. Canada’s North doesn’t come near India. But it touches two of the world’s most aggressive superpowers, both with northern investments that far outstrip Canada’s and populations above 60⁰N trained in the industrial economy that outnumber our Inuit vanguard by roughly 700 to 1.
Got to find a way to better these odds for Kerrin’s Inuk foster daughter. And soon.
The following links will bring you to Part 1 of this series, Yellowknife, Part 2, Kangiqsualujjuaq, and Part 3, Umiujaq

Food and learning under northern lights, Part 3/4 Umiujaq

Foster is a family name. Pammy’s great₂granddaughter Eunice, who was Kerrin’s grandmother, was born a Foster. When Kerrin perceived the desperate need in the Inuit community, it became a personal commitment. Her foster daughter is Inuk. Right now (2013) she has just turned eleven and is living in Umiujaq, near the eastern shore of Hudson Bay, where Kerrin teaches at Umiujaq-Kiluutaq School. At the mid-point of the 21st century she’ll be in her forties and part of the generation in charge of Canada’s North.
Canada is a big, big country, bigger than any other except Russia, with which it shares a northern border. But more than nine out of ten Canadians live in a narrow strip of land a hundred miles deep, stretching 3,000 miles east to west along Canada’s southern border with the United States. The rest of the great sweep of the country to the far, far North is largely unpopulated. Yet it is a bank of wealth beyond any other known on earth, bursting with mineral deposits and awash in hydrocarbons.
Alberta oilsands, Saskatchewan potash fields, Quebec hydro power, Ontario nickel, zinc and uranium are the low hanging globes of mega opportunity. There’s more, much more, in the far North. And there’s the fabled Northwest Passage, sought for centuries by adventurers, explorers and builders of fortune, a way to cut transit times and costs from Europe to Asia in half. As the Passage becomes navigable the world will be calling, with all its flotsam and jetsam and spillage and naval muscle. At Canada’s Northern extremity one of the world’s busiest shipping routes is about to open. Hadn’t thought much about that.
It’s the task of Kerrin’s foster daughter to think about it more than the rest of us. She’s one of “the people” as they call themselves in this land of ice and snow and giant floes and bears and whales and gas and oil. She’s young just now. But as an adult she’ll find herself at a critical intersection of global warming and commercial globalization, the two most confounding revolutions of our time. She has roots in America deeper than most others. How will she and her Inuit cousins fare through the cataclysmic years on the horizon?
She already exceeds all expectations of birth and survival as the product of an inconceivably complex and divergent ancestry, spiraling and branching back into primordial beginnings. Think of the cruelties of accident, chance and predation that beset the newborn, not least in the unforgiving Northern tundra. Had her ancestors back over countless generations not been one hundred percent successful at procreating, she could not exist. We are all of us, of course, next to impossible beings who have bested astronomical odds to be here, but she even more so. She’s one who knows the North, gigantic and unforgiving, beautiful and cruel. And she’s Canadian. That’s a combo as cool as it gets this century.
Canada’s North. It trips from the pen. But it’s been the tripping up of many, from Hudson, Franklin and Amundsen, who perished there, to unwary retailers of the 20th century who first offered free shipping “anywhere in North America.” Orders from the North for tinned goods and other heavy items by the case piled up. Shipping to the North is a big charge. There are no free deliveries any more to the North of North America.
Umiujaq, population 444, is a modern Inuit village. It was built and supplied within the last half century by order of the southern qallunaat (white guys, outsiders). It’s not alone in this respect. Many Inuk have been moved from traditional lands for reasons ranging from geopolitics (send some of them up North to bolster Canadian claims to sovereignty) to resource development (move them out of the way so we can get at the minerals and hydrocarbons we want). Umiujaq was one outcome of the massive James Bay hydro-electric project. It cost more than $20 billion to build, covers an area larger than the Maritime provinces and provides more than half of Hydro Québec’s output.
Part of a deal to relocate an Inuit community away from the Cree-dominated region. Umijuaq is 160 miles North of James Bay, where fish and game are not threatened by hydro development and they can preserve their traditional lifestyle. The traditional Inuit lifestyle sees most families in the North draw their livelihood from a combination of hunting, gathering and fishing, the sale of handmade commodities and a very modicum of wages. There are some local, small business opportunities for employment, some public service jobs, but very few or none in the smallest communities. Individuals and families may engage in all of these activities, making the best use of the opportunities available to them. Virtually no one lives by traditional pursuits alone, but few Aboriginal people in the North live entirely by wages, and there is little prospect that everyone will be able to do so in the future.
Country food harvesting and sharing have very high cultural value in Inuit communities. Social relations around producing food for the traditional economy are critical to the functioning of that economy, and the sharing of food through the extended family and community reinforce those relations.
Harvested country food is often cheaper and healthier than store-bought alternatives. It’s richer in protein and has lower fat content, particularly saturated fat, than meats imported from southern Canada. This applies not only to sea mammals and fish but also to beaver, muskrat, polar bear and caribou. Seal meat consists of 32% protein and two per cent fat, and caribou is 27% protein and one per cent fat. In contrast, beef is 17% protein and as much as 23% fat.
Construction of Umiujaq was completed in 1986 and the settlement took life. Of course in 1986 few people were talking about climate change. There wasn’t a lot of evidence of climate change. The ice wasn’t melting any faster than it usually did, or if it was who knew? The Northwest Passage was as impassable as always. Fish and game remained abundant. That was then.
Now it’s clear that climate change is causing the Arctic to warm twice as quickly as the rest of the world, trending toward an average annual increase of between six and 12 degrees celsius by the end of the century. One result already is a dramatic loss of the sea ice that reflects sunlight and helps cool the planet. Between March and September of 2012, 4.57 million square miles of Arctic sea ice melted. This area of melt is larger than the size of the continental United States. Another threat lies beneath the Northern permafrost, where massive amounts of methane are stored naturally. If this ever escapes it will add cataclysmically to global warming.
But nowhere is it more distressing than at home where interactions between environment, animals and people are all changing. We know that thin ice threatens hunters and fishers in search of marine life. It’s even more precarious when local knowledge is no longer as useful. Among animals, the narwhal, polar bear and walrus are susceptible and warmth could drive some species so far North that they’ll be extinguished.
But warming will also bring economic opportunity for the North, say the optimists. In May 2013 the U.S. Coast Guard and the White House released separate but complementary strategies for the Arctic region. As the Coast Guard puts it, “Sovereign and industrial activities will continue to evolve around access to an abundance of resources. These resources include an estimated 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil (90 billion barrels), 30 percent of undiscovered gas, and some one trillion dollars worth of minerals including gold, zinc, palladium, nickel, platinum, lead, rare-earth minerals, and gem-quality diamonds.”
Climate change has caused permanent ice cover to shrink to record low levels and, as the Coast Guard says, “environmental changes and economic incentives are driving a transformation of maritime activity.” Ships in Arctic waters have traditionally been there for exploration or scientific research. The new traffic is aimed at resource extraction, commercial shipments, tourism and many other pursuits. Arctic adventure and eco-tourism often involve transportation by vessel due to limited road and air infrastructure.
Economic opportunity is the primary driver for increasing human activity in the Arctic. An oceanic trade route across the Arctic from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific would represent a transformational shift in maritime trade, akin to the opening of the Panama Canal in the early 20th century. An Arctic marine highway would cut existing oceanic transit between Europe and Asia by an estimated 5,000 nautical miles. While a shipping route through Canada’s Northwest Passage has yet to prove economically viable (although transits of the passage by small craft are increasing), trans-Arctic traffic through Russia’s Northeast Passage is rising swiftly. In 2012, over one million tons of cargo transited this Northern Sea route, 46 vessels compared to 34 in 2011, and four in 2010. The Russians charge $400,000 per ship to sail along this route, for which they supply a nuclear-powered icebreaker when needed.
The Northwest Passage can’t be found on a map because the Passage is not a defined waterway but a route through various sounds, straits, bays, inlets and gulfs. Most voyages through the ice fields in the past 400 years or so have been by icebreakers. A Canadian icebreaker escorted an American oil tanker through in 1969. There was a flurry of concern about Canada’s Arctic sovereignty in 1985 when the U.S. Coast Guard sent the Polar Sea through without a “by your leave.” Since then Canada has waved U.S. ships through on a case-by-case basis, but the sovereignty question has been left in abeyance. Canada claims the Northwest Passage as internal. The U.S. and Russia believe it is international water. Others may take a stand in the matter anytime, a stand we won’t like, because the status of the Northwest Passage is going to become as changeable as the weather or, to be more exact, is going to change because of the weather. But like the weather, nobody knows for sure. The state of the science is imprecise. Speculation about what could happen ranges from one month of open water in 50 years to four months in 10 years.
But what is certain is that impenetrable pack ice will be free flowing waters for part of each year in the foreseeable future. An open Northwest Passage combined with the Northeast Passage across the top of Russia would encourage routine commercial shipping, spawn new fisheries and lead to smuggling, piracy, oil spills and all the usual problems of marine traffic that the nation with sovereign jurisdiction can expect to confront.
As the U.S. Coast Guard puts it, “The increase in vessel traffic presents challenges to sovereign capacity for incident prevention and response in the Arctic. A major casualty on board a large modern cruise ship in the Arctic would pose a significant challenge to responders and stress any one nation’s capacity for mass rescue at sea. If an oil tanker were to spill its cargo in Arctic waters the potential impact to the marine environment would be profound, and removing the oil would be challenging.”
If Canada is that sovereign nation, how would we do it, particularly if our jurisdiction should be challenged? Who knows? Through all the years since Canada acquired the Northwest Territories from the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1870 until we bought 275,000 sq. km. further North from Norway in 1930 for $67,000, up until right now, our commitment to Arctic development and security has been more rhetoric than reality. Canadian forces in the North are members of the Canadian Ranger Patrol Group. They are part-time Inuit reservists who wear bright red sweatshirts and red ball caps or toques, get paid for up to 12 days on guard a year (more if they’re called for emergencies such as search-and-rescue) and are armed with a #4 Lee-Enfield rifle, last manufactured in 1955. They are dedicated and watchful but they won’t enforce Canadian maritime law against tankers.
As radical changes in climate and culture remake the North for the new millennium, the Inuit taught byPammy’s great₄granddaughter Kerrin and her Inuk foster daughter are in the front line. But the responsible authority with all the clout is far away. Ottawa ranks among the coldest capitals on earth but it’s nowhere near what Canadians know as the North. It’s not near — it’s far away physically, culturally, environmentally, culturally — but it’s in charge.
The following links will bring you to Part 1 of this series, Yellowknife, Part 2, Kangiqsualujjuaq.and Part 4, True North

Nuggets

There is no country in the world that is not the motherland of some Canadians.

We are living the golden age. This is it. There has never been a better time to be alive, certainly in Canada. That’s the good news. The bad is it won’t be getting better. Our golden age will be remembered a thousand years from now as the age that squandered the planet’s future. We spent it all for ourselves and left garbage for our great grandchildren. Unless . . .

I stopped playing tennis after seventy years, driving after sixty. Habits of a lifetime are easy enough to give up. It’s all in the timing, like so much of life.

When your people have lived in this special place since the beginning of time it gives you a unique perspective. (Said of the Gwi’chin of Old Crow, the caribou people)

There’s just as much evidence for life after death as there is for no life after death. There’s zero evidence for either.

Nothing dies that is remembered. (After Brian Patterson)

In the industrial age we had the haves and the have-nots. In the communications age we have the knows and the know-nots. (After Frank Ogden)

Family includes those you would never put up with if they were not family.

Wisdom is distilled from recollections in tranquility.

Empowerment of women solves a lot. (After Christopher Hitchens)

Inuit are the pre-eminent ice-age survivors.

It is of equal value to the community overall that one has a million dollars as that a million have a dollar more. Each of those with a dollar will spend it. The one with a million will build.

In the capital economy the mint packages and distributes new currency. The mint of the knowledge economy packages and communicates new ideas.

Attention is the currency of the information age.

Chief enablers of alcoholics are usually those who love them most — family and friends.

Most people don’t read any more, or any more than they have to.

It’s never too soon to get your head in the cloud.

It takes a lifetime to break free of the zeitgeist you’re born into. For some it takes dying.

In poker the hand that needs no position is a good hand. The life that needs no position is a good life.

I’ve written too much because I’ve lived so long.

The situation you’d never be caught dead in is more than likely the one you’ll be in when you die.

Men need Mary. Men need Magdalene. Happy is he who discovers both-in-one.

All we know about what might have been is that it wouldn’t have been what is.

What a shame if after all none of it means anything.

Milestones is McDonald’s for the expense account crowd.

Communication + unity = Community

We receive the spark of life from forebears and pass it to progeny.

The war on drugs was the 20^th century equivalent of 16^th century witchburnings, irrational fear maintained by a bureaucracy of cops, courts and correctional services.

I’m a believer, just not a true believer.

All religions are cults but some are more cultured than others.

I may not be more creative under the influence of mind altering substances but sometimes I feel more creative and that counts for something.

Journalism is a public good and should be supported from the public purse. A City Editor on the provincial payroll would be a good start.

The internet is the start of the noosphere.

What a privilege it is to exist.

Before Igor there was the pretence of amity. After Igor came the Cold War.

To be, to exist at all, is either impossible or inevitable.

If you must choose, it’s better to love than be loved. (After “Pat” Patterson)

Everybody is different but every life is the same. (After Placide Gaboury)

None are so hidebound against change, so blind to consequence, so indifferent to side-effect, as those whose principles coincide with self-interest, the natural condition of the conservative.

There’s no beginning, middle and end to film. Just a beginning and a budget.

You stop when you have to. If you don’t stop then you’re dead, sometimes living dead.

How long can I be this lucky?

Once in every century there’s a palindromic year. Once in each millennium we will cross a lengthy palindromic bridge. Is it just magical thinking to invest significance in these dates? The turn of the third millennium saw the re-awakening of Asian giants that had been suppressed for centuries, unparalleled prosperity throughout American and European democracies, the advance of technology from fast flowing to torrential and, probably most important, the inexorable advance of women toward gender equality.

You can preserve yourself a little bit longer by depriving yourself a little bit more.

Life gives no choice but to take each day as it comes. Today I am heartbroke. Tomorrow my heart will sing.

Recuperative power so strong there’s never any sign the day after of how you were the night before.

The A-List of people who don’t do what they say they will is composed of alzheimers patients, adolescents and alcoholics.

There are certain civilities it does well to attend to even when you’re in the middle of a difficult situation.

I often don’t do what I should and I often do what I shouldn’t but usually I do what I must.

If you’re well when you die you don’t know about it. You feel fine. Then you’re dead. If you’re sick enough you want to die. It’s a relief. The trouble with dying is all about thinking and worrying about it. This is the fault of the medical profession. Instead of telling people that they’re going to die because everyone dies, here’s a pill and call if the fever rises, doctors tell them they have something terminal so they can worry themselves to death even before dying.

I’ve learned what I’m doing wrong but I haven’t learned how to stop doing it.

The ugliest is as hard to pick as the most beautiful.

For everyone who does what he wants and damn the cost, others pay the price.

Alice Munro and country music come as close to the truth of life as anything I know.

Life and labour will evolve to the stage when work consists of getting up in the morning to contemplate. (After Paul Buckley)

The essence of wisdom is mulled experience, perceptions turned round in the mind and seen from all sides. The more you see, the more is revealed, the more understood. This explains why the old are wiser. They have more to mull upon. They have more time. There is nothing more important for the old to do than reflect upon their past.

Journalists of the twenty first century face extinction unless they professionalize.

Journalism must be recognized and supported as a public good.

Poker leaves one so accustomed to cruel loss that it no longer hurts.

Nobody wins in life who hasn’t got used to losing.

In a near-death struggle you must focus.

On the whole I’ve received more than I’ve given. That wasn’t my aim. It just sort of worked out that way.

She sometimes has to get quite rough to turn men off, so powerfully does she turn them on.

Writers live twice. Once when it happens. Then when they write about it, cleaning it up a bit, adding a few imaginative wish-it-had-been-so’s. Writing is a great experience extender.

Some people don’t know what love is. Some do and are afraid. The rest of us are electrified whenever it strikes.

Some people want to go out in style. I don’t care a damn for style. Let me go out in love.

At 25 people know most about the future, at 35 they are very much in the present, while from 45 on most are cuffed to the past and need to be yanked hard if any change is to happen.

Half the men a woman wants to attract are otherwise engaged or impervious to her particular charms and the half she does attract are mostly a rotten fit.

“Look no hands,” the boys show off but the girls look away.

Some say she changes her mind a lot but I say she just talks her decisions through out loud.

My religion is my life, and vice versa. The way I eat, sit, talk, behave. That is my religion.

The quieter you become the more you can hear.

Anger defeats one in battle and in life.

Live long, die healthy, that’s the ticket.

The meaning of life is consciousness.

The purpose of life is to pass it on.

To be human needs constant revision, like editing a text.

Cultivating the mind is as necessary as feeding the body.

Canadians are people of the cod in a land of too much.

Profit is the corporate equivalent of love.

Principles are only as good as their practitioners.

Food and learning under northern lights, Part 2/4 Kangiqsualujjuaq

It was good to visit with family in the south for a while. Ottawa is south for anyone from the territories. But Kerrin knew she’d be going back. Pammy’s great₄granddaughter hadn’t experienced Canada’s true north yet, the land of the Inuit. There are many northern peoples. There are nine aboriginal languages recognized officially by the NWT government that sits in Yellowknife. But the most northern of all are the Inuit, the original and enduring people of the polar region, who for countless generations until less than a lifetime ago endured privations and a nomadic existence in an unforgiving land. Kerrin wanted to know what Inuit village life was all about, the hunting and fishing, jobs, social life, entertainments, what the people ate. She was Qallunaat, to be sure, an outsider. But she hoped for the best. It started with a memorable first day at school, recorded in the diary she began when she got there but abandoned not long after when the art bug bit her.

January 26, 2007
I’m going to teach again, this time in a small Inuit community on Ungava Bay. It is a very remote settlement – the only one on the east side of the bay.  [Ed. note: Kangiqsualujjuaq, population 874, also known as George River, is in Nunavik, which is the virtually self-governing far northern region of Quebec.]
Flight from Ottawa to Mtl – Mtl to Kujjuaq to George River by Twin Otter. You really know you are flying when in a Twin Otter.  It is cold, dark and very loud. The snow is blowing when we arrive. It is blowing, not snowing. This is something I will have to get used to. The wind is howling and whipping the outer lining of my western arctic parka about me. My coat snaps like a flag in a gusting northern wind. It is dark and relatively mild for this time of year, -8 when it should be -40.
January 27
The weekend is spent hunkered down in my dismally bare apt. It may take up to two weeks to get the meagre decorations and food supplies I have had sent up. I brought only what I would be willing to abandon if necessary. I have no intention of leaving before the end of June but some people only last a day and the school board won’t remove any belongings unless you’re here six weeks. I’m on a term position for the rest of the year. The students have been without a teacher for almost a month and I hurried to get here.
I am pretty much the last option though the last candidate. All others backed out soon after being hired, opting for less isolated settlements. But this is what I want to see — the communities. I regretted after being in Yellowknife fourteen years that I had never seen the communities. But I was thinking of the western arctic.
January 28
The wind howls eerily all weekend.  I can see only rock and snow outside my window.  Occasionally a snowmobile roars down the street. There are packs of beautiful looking but hungry dogs roaming constantly. When the wind dies and the town sleeps and the furnace stops, and the refrigerator, the silence is so complete your ears hurt for straining to hear a sound. Desolate is the only word for my first impression.
January 29
It’s Monday and my first day at school – though I have been given till Wednesday to prepare. After lunch Mark comes with unwelcome news. There was a suicide at lunch. I never met her though she will always remain in my memory as my introduction to life here. Her name was Celina. She was 17.
January 31
The quality of the snow here is unlike anything I have ever seen. Last night a wind came up and blew huge drifts of snow to new locations. I had finally found a solid path through to the school but it is now gone. It is impossible to tell where one might walk safely. My solid path of yesterday may be knee deep today. Even the Inuit are unsure. One asked me just yesterday if my path was solid and had his daughter follow me to school. Like desert sands the snow dunes shift. One foot from the path lies the possibility of a wrenched knee or twisted ankle. But when the path is set it is hard as packed earth. The force of the wind and the lack of moisture leave no space among the solid crystals and the snow is the density of cork. The children use machete type knives to build igloo type snow forts cutting and shaping snow blocks as easily as southern children shape plasticine.
The Weekend
I played poker with the cops and a few teachers on Friday night. It will be difficult to play with them as they care nothing about winning or losing. The cops are a young couple. She likes to do paint by numbers while he likes to cook. Neither of them were trained or had any experience when they were hired though he had worked for a time as a prison guard. They came up, were given guns and the way was pointed to the station.  They are all alone working 24 hours a day seven days a week. Only one is on shift at any time. When a call comes in, the other joins in for the call. The officer not on duty gets paid three hours for the call. There have been none for a few weeks now – but they come in waves. There are supposed to be three police officers here but no one wants to come. After the game I saw noone from Friday evening till Monday morning.
Monday Feb 5th
My students are helping me piece together the story of the town. Their parents were born on the tundra in tents 40 years ago. Now half of the adults in the community are on welfare and half of the teenagers have dropped out of school. The few remaining students have little good to say about their former classmates. They are home watching television, drinking and smoking pot and neglecting the babies they start having in their teens. The students who have stayed will be the future leaders in the community.
Feb 6^th
C. drove me to the municipal building after school to get my modem.  She is young – maybe twenty and has an admin job at school. She went to school here all her life. “And I graduated.” She is proud and holds a good job. She missed work today. Giselle, in the classroom next door, made a drinking sign. Sunday night there had been a big booze delivery.
The town is restricted, not dry. Booze can be ordered from the south. One case of beer and four bottles of wine per month. Hard liquor was banned a month ago. The bootleggers are ecstatic. They will get $200 for a bottle of alcohol. A single beer regularly sells for $10 though $20 is not unheard of. Mostly everyone takes advantage of the lack of spirits when they have the opportunity to go south. Montreal is the port of call and a doctor’s visit is a gold mine when you can return with a suitcase of liquor.
Feb 7^th
Road safety is not a concern here. Seatbelts, child seats, helmets are all of the south. Children as young as 11 drive snowmobiles pulling others on sled behind. Mothers and fathers drive kids to school on snowmobiles with cousins and neighbors piled 10 to a kamatik. Teens fly by in trucks with friends sitting on the sideboards in the bed. Today a truck pulled up beside two youngsters. They hopped up onto the rear bumper and held onto the tailgate and the truck moved off down the road. There are eight stop signs in town. These are new and result from an accident a few years ago at an intersection. These are the only street signs or traffic regulating devices in town.
Feb. 8
Crystal upstairs is having a hard time with one young boy – she teaches grade five. This guy – who is bigger than her – punched her in the face in the yard at school. This was after pushing her on the stairs, throwing boots at her, yelling at her constantly in class and in the halls to fuck off and die, you’re a whore, you’re a cunt etc. Crystal is upset. She is afraid to go out and now keeps her door locked.
The Students
Don’t get me wrong, most of the students are really great. The usual problems with teenagers exist of course but for the most part the students are lovely. However Philip was telling me that a month into school this year the kindergarten students were so out of control that the entire class was suspended for two weeks. A month later it was the grade twos. And there have been incidents of extreme violence – which is scary in a community where two year olds have access to unlocked guns and plenty of ammunition.

Feb. 9
Of course it isn’t really the kids fault. Many of them have very bad home lives. The parents are up gambling all night and sleep all day. They will gamble their whole cheque away in one night. There is no food and often times no one to take care of them. Two sisters are off school right now taking care of the house while their mother is away giving birth to yet another baby. They are the 15 and 16 year old caregivers to a house full of kids. They’ll be out of school for two weeks. It also keeps most of their friends from attending as everyone is over at their house all night.
Feb. 10
I have finally made an Inuit friend. Daisy. She is a janitor at the school and the mother of Louisa, one of the 3-4-5 class. She came to the door to see if I wanted to buy a broach Louisa made, an embroidered broach adorned with a hanging pair of sealskin mucklucks. It was well crafted and I bought it for $25.00. I thought it a good enough deal. It was a good thing I was on the phone or I might not have invited her in. She is the third person, though the first woman, who has come to the door trying to sell things. She was in and as we were chatting I invited her to stay for tea. She was here about an hour. She is delightful and we will go shopping on Saturday to the Co-op. We are going to shop for material and she is going to make an amouti type pouch for me to carry Molly in. I’m sure it will be expensive but I need one for her. I also need a kettle Daisy said. It will be my first shopping expedition to the Co-op though it is only five minutes walk at most.
The Dogs
Felix is in charge of maintaining dog control in town. Felix is actually in charge of lots of things. He is a big man around here and one of the best looking men I have ever seen. Every few months Felix will get a dog in heat tie it in the back of his truck and drive slowly through town luring the loose male dogs out to the dump. He then shoots them.  Sometimes he takes the fur. Apparently the fur from black shiny dogs is quite good. According to his grandfather it is the best for wearing close to your face – it doesn’t freeze and stick to your skin.
Feb 13^th
The kid who was hassling Crystal attacked her on the street last night. He ran up and punched her in the face as she was leaving the Northern store. Mark came and the cops (her best friends) but they say there is nothing they can do as he is only 11. I think they can. It is assault. If he had a gun or had set a fire they would have taken him in. But they say they need permission from the parents to try scare tactics and the parents – well they just shrug.
Feb. 14
I guess anyone can have access to guns. Yesterday I went to the Northern and there were two snowmobiles running outside both with shotguns leaned up against the seat. I wonder if they were loaded. No one needs permits here and two of my secondary4 students were out shooting ptarmigan at lunch on Friday just behind the school. I guess if ptarmigan are spotted they can go to the IPL teacher downstairs and get guns. I will be meeting one of the more violent students tomorrow. Monday week three. Apparently he was in my class the first day I taught it but didn’t stand out. He has been suspended ever since. We will see.
February 20
The kids are having a hard time with socials. English can be made relevant to almost anyone. And some kids are just really good at and enjoy math. But socials? Well. It is hard to make European Inventions and Exploration during the Renaissance relevant to grade nine and ten Inuit students many of whom are AAD or FAS. They just don’t care and I don’t blame them. And what does it matter to most of them if they graduate or not.  This is where 97% of them will spend the rest of their lives. There is 50% unemployment and most of the boys want to drive the water truck when they grow up. The girls want to work at the daycare. There is certainly no need for an early-childhood education degree to work at the daycare here.
February 26
School is tough. The kids are capable but for the most part lazy. Two out of 13 did their family time-line project. But, they have been spoon fed for the past 8 years – and they are working in a second language and I must remember that. I am going to try to change my methods to more fun activities and attempt to be more project based. I can start with projects on different First Nations groups with the sec1’s. More movies, etc. etc. I am not going to do the math in Economics as I don’t know it and they don’t need it.
March 5
Daisy has had four children. The two girls she raised I believe – Nancy is 21 and works with the elders. Louisa is still in school. One of her boys died from meningitis at eight months – she said she let him go because the doctor said she could have more children. And she has a son Elijah. Daisy was in the avalanche and mentioned it three times while here. She is obviously still having a very hard time dealing with the tragedy.  Jan 1^st, 2000 I think [Ed. note: 1999]. An avalanche slammed into the school gym collapsing the wall. Eight people were killed and dozens injured. A chair flew at Daisy and hit her in the stomach – she has had problems ever since though there is nothing the doctors can do. I think she has been to Montreal numerous times – she mentioned the hospital a lot. She is 47 – same as me. What different lives we have led though she did attend Algonquin school at one point – she didn’t pass she told me. What with the culture shock and difference in schooling levels it is no wonder. When she was young she would travel by dog sled from Kujjuaq to Kangiqsualujjuaq with her parents. It would take two days and was lots of fun. Her parents are both dead now. She is from Kujjuaq originally but likes it better here. There is a bar there where she lost two brothers. One was murdered and the other sustained severe head injuries – from the way she talked the second is worse off than the first. I feel Daisy will be my needed link to the people here. And she said I will really like the fishing. The char are thick as flies in the spring and jump from the water after the bait. They are renowned for putting up a really good fight.
March 12
It is not unusual for kids to be wandering around the streets in the wee hours of the morning. The parents are partying or fornicating and they kick the kids out or don’t let them into the house. And there is no one to help.
Of course this is not always the case. Some are luckier. I met Susan’s mother at parent teacher interviews a week into my journey here. She saw my tattoo and asked if it hurt. I said not really. She immediately pulled off her coat and showed me her arm which was covered in bruises. It looked bad. I asked her how it happened. She said she was drunk and fighting. But she is kind and caring and at least makes it to parent-teacher interviews.  Though, as she approached down the hall the teacher next door hurried over to me and whispered to be very careful about what I said about Susan. If the mother hears anything bad she will yell and yell at her. I was glad to be warned though as far as I was able to tell at that point Susan was a lovely girl. On task and trying hard at school.
March 19
I moved to the beach – there is a view to die for. It is on a bay just up the George River from Ungava Bay with mountains in the background – spectacular is the only word that comes to mind. There are lots of kids around and I like that. What I don’t like is them looking in the windows and trying to get Molly worked up. They bang on the window and bark at her and ask to come in. And they bang on the door and run away. Kids!  But I am not going to let them in. I will ask my kids down at times perhaps but not all the kids off the street.
March 26
They are a very pretty people – for the most part. The kids are really cute but at this time of year their noses drip snot and they often have sores from being so chapped. Their lips are terribly cracked and peeling.
Life is very tough for a lot of the kids. Many are adopted by grandparents or aunts and uncles. Many are abused either physically or emotionally. The top priorities are drugs and alcohol. Families on welfare are given food coupons to ensure not all the money is spent on gambling and drugs. The houses are supplied but many are without beds, fridges etc. though every home has a television. A young man came to the door the other day selling a pendant of a dancing polar bear. He said he was from out of town and staying at a house where there was no food. He said the kids were hungry. My students said he was lying – he just wanted a joint. Nice pendant though. I am going to give it to Chris if he likes it. I am also going to try to get a market going for some of the kids’ artwork – ulus and carvings.
March 27
There used to be a meat factory here. Isabelle said they killed all the caribou. They thought it was the George River herd but it turned out to be a sub herd. They are all gone.  Too bad – caribou is a specialty high-end product down south and in Europe. They could make a small fortune if they worked it properly.
March 28
A. and C. are the biggest challenges in terms of behaviour.

Once she caught the beat of the place, Kerrin got a kitchen going to provide hot, nutritious meals to staff and students, as well as cater special events for the town. This CanTeen raised thousands of dollars for school and community activities, including a grad trip to Montreal, food baskets for needy families at Christmas and T-shirts featuring the new school logo for all the students.
As in Yellowknife, where she took turns as clown and face painter at festivities and actor/director in community theatre, she was an after hours dervish. In some ways, this extra-curricular activity touched youth who were not making it in a system imported from the south, modified though it was for Inuit cultural imperatives. Nine out of ten Inuk students in Nunavik are behind grade level when entering high school (the rate for the rest of Quebec is less than two out of ten). Four out of five will not graduate.
At the edge of the earth where global warming strikes first and foremost, with strategic world players all staring intently at resources and passages in places where none but the Inuit have ever lived, scenarios for the future become monumental and complex. But in real time, on the frozen ground, it’s the kids who can take it and make it through who will make a difference, one Inuk at a time. Some will make the thousand year leap from where their grandparents were to where their own children and grandchildren must live. These are going to be increasingly important people as the century moves on and the world closes in. The Inuit will need them. Canada will need them.
Kerrin remained in Kangiqsualujjuaq for five years. She then took a turn as den mother in a group home for foster children in Kujjuuaq, the principal town of Nunavik. She was interested and involved in looking after Inuit children who fall through the usual safety net of parents, family and friends. These are the neediest among a people struggling to find a way between a harsh life at the edge of survival and whatever is coming with the Qallunaat. After her grown daughter, Olivia, returned to Yellowknife, where she’d been brought up and educated, Kerrin took in a seven year old girl who’d had a frightful beginning involving parental murder and serial abuse through more than a dozen uncaring placements.
It’s not a legal adoption. Qallunaat don’t get to adopt Inuit children. Yet in everything but law she’s part of the family now (11 years old in 2013), an Inuk great₅granddaughter for Pammy. And more fuel for Kerrin’s northern passion. After a year in Kujjuuaq, a rough and unruly frontier town, the two of them and Molly were off to the other side of Nunavik. She’d be teaching there in Umiujaq, a village on Hudson Bay. On arrival she wrote, “Kangiqsualujjuaq is a metropolis by comparison.”
The following links will bring you to Part 1 of this series, Yellowknife, Part 3, Umijuaq and Part 4, True North

Food and learning under northern lights, Part 1/4 Yellowknife

Muskox Bourguignonne
Muskox strip loin, Mushrooms and Pearl Onions simmered in Red Wine
Caribou Stroganoff
Ground Caribou and Mushrooms simmered in a Garlic Sour Cream Sauce

Northern entrées by Pammy’s great₄granddaughter

Museum of History facing Parliament Hill

The Canadian Museum of History is built as a grand curvilinear that grasps the Gatineau bank of the Ottawa River opposite Parliament Hill. In the museum’s Canada Hall a great journey is simulated through many centuries and over vast distance via icons of Canada’s social history. Under the ceiling’s super high dome the adventure starts at a sod longhouse, part of a Viking settlement on the northern tip of Newfoundland around 1000 AD. Basque ship, whaling station, Métis settlement, Voyageur camp, Ukrainian church, grain elevator, Chinese hand laundry, the many turns and tides of the Canadian historical experience are replicated. Finally, at the far end of the trek through Canada’s history, the visitor is invited to sit, sip tea and listen a while to tales of the frozen northwest in the warm welcome of the Wildcat Café.
The Wildcat is faithfully reproduced and featured at the museum because it was at the core of the pioneer community of Yellowknife and remains a symbol of identity in the Northwest Territories. In this expanse of more than a million square kilometers of the Canadian northlands just 41,000 people face tremendously challenging climatic extremes. (Nunavut, which was carved from the Northwest Territories in 1999 and stretches to Alert, 800 kms from the North Pole and the northernmost permanently inhabited point in the world, has twice the area of NWT, just 31,000 people and even more challenging conditions.) In the harsh northern frontier, prospectors, bush pilots, miners and trappers created places where they could exchange information and stories. The Wildcat was a popular gathering spot, part of the core and colour of Yellowknife. Built in 1937, an early owner also ran one of the two taxis then operating in town. His was the bigger car and he contrived a head-on collision with the other cab to drive his competitor out of business.

The Wildcat was popular but not always prosperous. It served at various times as an eatery, a Chinese restaurant, an ice cream and soda stand. Once it featured steam baths next door. Each new venture told of a previous failure. Finally, in the 1970s a volunteer group undertook to restore the log cabin, now one of the last remaining buildings in what had been the commercial centre of Yellowknife in the 1940s, and reopen it in 1979 as a restaurant featuring northern fare such as caribou and char.
It was this enterprising revival that caught the interest of the Museum of Civilization, which was itself re-housed in the sweeping cantilevered vision of Métis architect Douglas Cardinal in 1989, though it traces its origins as one of North America’s oldest cultural institutions back to 1856 (and was renamed the Canadian Museum of History in 2013).
Icon it might be, but the Wildcat wasn’t protected by any heritage or museum budget. Enthusiasts for heritage restoration proved over time not as adept at restaurant management. What the museum didn’t know – Yellowknife is a long way off and there are no direct flights – was that the restaurant had fallen on hard times again even as they were building the full-scale replica in Canada Hall. There was a danger that the Wildcat would be closing just as the Canada Hall exhibit was opening.
Then Pammy’s great₄granddaughter took a hand. Kerrin had lived a decade in Yellowknife. A single mom with a fresh teaching degree from McGill, she’d come to teach at the school named for John Franklin. Her ancestor had once encountered the famed northern explorer. Returning in 1827 from two years of exploration in the Arctic, Franklin stopped at Bytown (now Ottawa) and presided at a ceremony at the entrance locks of the Rideau Canal on August 16. Pammy was among “as large and respectable gathering of spectators as had ever been witnessed at this place” for Franklin’s show. The intrepid adventurer, who would later return on a fourth expedition to the far north and disappear completely, laid the first stone of the great work that Colonel By and his men, the sapper Pammy among them, would strive mightily to build over the next five years.
Kerrin’s address — Trail’s End, Northwest Territories — spoke of vistas in the Canadian landscape that few have witnessed. Born and bred in Montreal, a big city girl, she came to know the midnight sun, the great life forms, the northern lights, the huge expanses and ice floes. “The north grows on you,” say those who know. “Eventually you have to decide whether you will spend the rest of your life there or get out.” Kerrin sank roots. She would stay.
Teaching was her vocation, cuisine her passion with some strong family antecedents. A grandfather owned one of the signature restaurants in mid-twentieth century Montreal. Her stepmother acquired the Grande Diplome of the Cordon Bleu Paris Cooking School, still on Kerrin’s kitchen wall.
The Wildcat was a summer project, mostly months she was off from her primary occupation teaching art and drama to mostly Inuit high school students. Arctic summers are much like those in the rest of the country, with the exceptional delight that the sunlight and the days often stretch twenty hours or longer. Yellowknife has more sunshine each year than anywhere in British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, or the Maritime provinces.
The distance from the replica tea room at the Museum to actual operation of the Wildcat is captured in this monologue from Kerrin’s unfinished play about food and family, Wildcat Capers. The lights come up on Cook. She is pounding caribou and occasionally swatting flies. She is wearing the patch. It’s 4:00 at the Wildcat and the restaurant is prepping for dinner.

Cook: “Veg! Veg, veg, veg! Damned ferry. Damned veg. Always a problem. Friday afternoon, four o’clock, the food order shows up – no potatoes – no corn. Brunch tomorrow and no potatoes for home fries – no veg for tonight. Fucking produce guys. Only a lunatic opens a seasonal restaurant during break-up. Where does one find 100 lbs of potatoes at four o’clock on Friday afternoon in Yellowknife? Co-op! Not supposed to shop for the restaurant at the Co-op. Costly. But what’s a girl gonna do? Boy the flies are bad today! Anyway, Danica has the car again and she’s not answering the phone. Again. It’s nice she’s still here but why does she always have my car? I am not taking a taxi to the Co-op for potatoes and veg. Twenty dollar taxi for a twenty dollar grocery bill. Well it would be down south but this is Yellowknife and the ferry isn’t in. Fucking ferry. I can pick up potatoes at Extra foods tomorrow morning and get down here before . . . No. No I can’t. Shit! Veg, veg, veg! Ok – I got carrots, celery and onion for sure. A nice mira-poix for the dinner veg? Could stuff peppers. Never been a pepper person, only in chili and spaghetti sauce. Anyway peppers stuffed with rice and served with rice and fish won’t wash, not for 16.95 a plate. God it’s hot in here. Turnip! There’s turnip left from Gord’s stew. Turnip and carrot mash. I love that. A Christmas staple at home. My favorite thing on the plate – besides the beet salad. Best thing about Christmas is the cold turkey and mayonnaise sandwiches on white bread the next morning. Plain, just salt, pepper, mayo. Marcus puts stuffing and cranberries on his, which I personally think is a mistake. (Calling backstage) Tara – could you please bring in those turnips (pause) they’re in the bag in the produce cupboard? Turnip and carrot mashed with butter salt and pepper. And beets. We have beets. A mound of turnip and carrots with beets on top. Beets warmed in melted butter with salt, pepper and . . . dill. Great! I’ve gotta use up that dill. I have a car load of the stuff. It will be tasty and look great on the plate! Bridget always said we eat first with our eyes. Dad always said it better taste good too. I can please both. But he’s right. Nana judged restaurants on how clean their bathrooms were. Daddy by the bread. Now I can pee in a dirty latrine but I insist on fresh rolls. (Again to backstage) Tara could you bring the beets too? They’re in the box under the rotten onions. Fucking produce guys. I want a credit for those onions! And the romaine!”

Kerrin ran the historic Wildcat for four seasons, for another year had her own eponymous eatery, then set off to a new frontier. Yellowknife is a pioneer town still, with a population just shy of 20,000. Only Whitehorse in the western Yukon Territory is larger, by a few thousand people, in the whole of the immense Canadian north. But Yellowknife is the NWT capital and by far the largest city in the eastern territories. Kerrin was ready to experience traditional Inuit communities. True north.
She gave notice to John Franklin, sold the house at Trail’s End and Kerrin’s Restaurant. Danica and Marcus helped stow fifteen years of accumulation and Molly the dog in a convoy of north-beaten vehicles that took the four of them almost 5,000 kilometres over seven days to near the parental home in the Nation’s Capital.
The following links will bring you to Part 2 of this series, Kangiqsualujjuaq, Part 3, Umiujaq and Part 4, True North.

While the getting is good

I’ve written (here) about the Scottish strain in Canada. Their masterful hands sculpted the historic Rideau waterway, including the largest dam in North America in its day (1832) at Jones Falls (above). Their great qualities of prudence and moderation pervaded the banking system and large segments of Canadian business until the country was a hundred years old, an era I’ve written about here. Today I’m reminded how profoundly things have changed in the past half century or so. Scots are no longer in the ascendant. We now have moguls of English, German, Austrian, Hungarian origin. Even Irish. Even from among Pammy‘s fast spreading family. And the change is nowhere more evident than in pay packets.
The July-August 2013 edition of the Globe and Mail Report on Business Magazine (ROB) tells the tale in its analysis of the Top 1000 corporations in Canada. The Royal Bank of Canada leads the list, as it usually does, with profit of $7.4 billion. Its CEO, Gord Nixon, collects $14 million for steering RBC.
Way down at the bottom of the ROB list is gas-producer Encana Corp. of Calgary, No. 1000 with a loss of nearly $3 billion. (ROB ranks the Top 1000 companies in Canada by profitability but just over half of the thousand — 544 to be precise — show any profit at all. The rest are all losers for 2012.) Encana’s CEO last year, Randy Eresman, was paid only $7 million. As ROB meanly calculates, Mr. Nixon’s bank made $542 of profit for every loonie he was paid. Mr. Eresman was paid more than $2,500 for every million dollars down the toilet at Encana. According to a calculation by Corporate Knights magazine, Mr. Nixon and Mr. Eresman were each paid 92 times the average salary in their respective companies, an intriguing coincidence.
Who decides this kind of compensation practice, and why? There’s no denying that, like the Big Mac, it’s an importation from the U.S. of A. Mr. Nixon explains it this way in the ROB. “It is a global market, a competitive market . . . most of my top executives have been offered very big positions in the United States and elsewhere.” As if on cue, Mark Carney makes his debut as the new governor of the Bank of England, filched by the Brits from the Bank of Canada. Mr. Nixon might point to this but he refrains. Mark Carney’s salary will be $1.4 million (decimal point not misplaced). He’s a public servant. At the Royal Bank of Scotland, which predates RBC by a hundred and forty years, the CEO was dismissed last month amidst a scandal over high salaries and bonuses. His salary had been the equivalent of $3.5 million with a chance three years forward at another $2.6 million. These are all big numbers. But some are a lot bigger than others. So who decides? Does Mr. Nixon set his own pay level? Does Mr. Eresman? No way. These are Board decisions. Directors decide.
Research for the New York Times (June 29), finds that for the “top 200 chief executives at public companies with at least $1 billion in revenue . . . the median 2012 pay package came in at $15.1 million — a leap of 16 percent from 2011.” Of course even the most ambitious and self-confident Canadian business executive might feel it a long stretch to become CEO of a multi-billion dollar American enterprise. That’s OK because it’s not necessary to reach the very top in order to become very wealthy. As the NYT points out, “Because the data shows only chief executives’ pay, it does not reveal how good it still is to be a prince . . . compensation of the No. 2 executives at some of these companies would have vaulted them to the top ranks on the C.E.O. roster.”
Jim Hynes recalls that, “My father retired as President of C-I-L with a very modest pension just about a decade before it became fashionable to push CEO compensation up to obscene levels. Had I stayed in the banking business, I might have gotten a monumentally unearned slice of this pie myself. This phenomenon, like the credit default swap, is an American invention that we’re stuck with, and like gun control, it isn’t going to get fixed anytime soon.”

David, Pammy’s great₂grandson

At least noone in Canada tried to push Larry Ellison last year. The larger-than-life CEO of Oracle took $84.5 million from the company to fund his expensive and enduring pursuit of yachting’s America’s Cup. Peter Munk’s gold-plated lures for directors at Barrick or Frank Stronach’s platinum-lined parachute from Magna don’t compare. Not since 2001 have we seen anything like it, when Canadian Pacific was split into five independent and self-sustaining companies after a century at the core of Canadian business and regional development. The CEO who made that break-up call received compensation, according to reports, somewhere above $83 million. This was Canadian money, of course, not American like Mr. Ellison’s. Then again it was a dozen years ago.
Who makes these decisions? Directors do and primus inter pares of directors is the Chair. The Chair usually gives a lead and the Board decides. In some cases the Chair and the CEO are one and the same. This was the case at CP in 2001, when the Chair and CEO who got the Canadian break-up fee of the century was Pammy’s great₂grandson, David. The titles used to be joined at the RBC as well, in Earle McLaughlin‘s day (Earle’s day was about the same as Jim’s dad Leonard Hynes and he had a similar restrained grasp), but they’ve been split for some time now at Canada’s biggest bank. Mr. Nixon is CEO. The Chair is Pammy’s great₂grandson David. Similarly at Encana. Mr. Eresman was succeeded early this year as CEO by Clayton Woitas. But the Chair remains the same as before. That would be Pammy’s great₂grandson David.
Pammy’s starting wage as lockmaster at Chaffey’s on the Rideau Canal was $0.80 a day. During the boating season that was a 24 hour day. I write about some of that here.