Peter Mansbridge: The Arctic is a land of opportunity for Canada but we can't leave Northern residents behind
Travelling the Northwest Passage, Mansbridge meets those whose home and future is changing before their eyes
I have been travelling to the High Arctic for more than 50 years. I took my latest trip, another exhilarating voyage, through parts of the Northwest Passage in the fall of 2021 while filming the CBC Docs original Arctic Blue with Peter Mansbridge.
I remember my first time inside the Arctic Circle in the late '60s. I flew over Grise Fiord just 15 years after Canada, as a nation, had first relocated a number of Inuit families from northern Quebec to what was then a barren strip of land in the High Arctic and start new communities.
Why did we do it? Basically, for the Inuit to act as human flagpoles in an attempt to underline Canada's ownership of the Arctic archipelago, even though most of the lands were uninhabited.
Bureaucrats said the relocations were intended to help the Inuit, who were finding it difficult to survive as subsistence hunters. But guess who wasn't sitting around the table when that decision was made? That's right. The Inuit.
They were fed a line of spin about where they were going and the resources it offered, and then moved by sealift to Ellesmere Island with a promise that they could leave if they didn't like it. They didn't like it, but no one listened, and they're still there today.
I tell you that story because history is important — and it's especially relevant in light of what's at play in the Arctic right now.
A changing Arctic means opportunity and exploitation
Climate change makes everything different. There are challenges for sure, but there are also opportunities.
In the Arctic, ice is melting — and fast — and the waterways are opening up. Mineral exploration is increasing, and the unrealized potential of the Northwest Passage as a transportation thoroughfare is front and centre. Many countries are ready to put their stake in the still frozen, but increasingly lucrative, tundra.
Take a look at a globe from the top. Imagine all that ice around the North Pole vanishing, because that's what scientists around the world are convinced will be the case during Arctic summers long before the end of this century.
Now, look at the number of countries that can claim varying degrees of ownership when those waters touch their coastlines. It's not just Canada. Add the United States, Denmark, Russia, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Iceland.
Debates will not just be about security, they'll also be about the potential billions in natural resources and hundreds of thousands of new jobs that come with them — in a region desperate for both. And Canada is lagging behind the advancements made by the other Arctic nations in preparation for the journey toward those riches.
But this is a complicated story, as I saw and heard throughout the parts of the Arctic our documentary crew visited.
A conversation of contradictions
There's a justified desire to use any financial gains from local resources to improve basic infrastructure in the communities nearby and a plea from young people, whose numbers are increasing rapidly, for jobs so they can stay in the North.
But there's also a hope — in some cases, from the same people — to keep their traditional way of life which, for centuries, has depended on fishing and hunting. The conversation is fraught with contradiction and is playing out across the Arctic.
In Pond Inlet, mayor Joshua Arreak sees the benefits his community could reap from expansion of a nearby mine but understands why the idea of further development is meeting resistance.
"Our mammals and land animals have been affected," he tells me in Arctic Blue. "And we like country food — we harvest that every year."
A question of sovereignty
No one knows the challenge in Canada's North better than Governor General Mary Simon. "We need development in the North, but at the same time, we shouldn't have to forsake our own culture and identity through the same process. So there has to be a balance," she says in the documentary.
Simon has been an advocate for Inuit rights and Indigenous sovereignty for decades and oversaw the international push by Inuit from across the Arctic nations to make their case known to the world. She did that effectively in Canada by knocking heads at times with a certain Pierre Elliott Trudeau in the early '80s.
Today, after being selected by Trudeau's son, she is the sovereign's representative in Canada — with national sovereignty high on the list of her priorities.
It may seem counterintuitive, but as she told me during our sit-down in the documentary, "because there's so many changes taking place now, [there] might be a situation where you see a lot of control taken by nation states and the communities being left behind."
My most recent time in the Arctic was spent on the latest "flagpole" of our sovereignty and the Canadian navy's newest warship, the HMCS Harry DeWolf, as it travelled to Grise Fiord, Pond Inlet and Arctic Bay.
Eventually, there will be five similar vessels, costing a total of $4.1 billion.
Sure, they'll hunt for those foreign submarines Canada knows have been through the Passage, and they'll watch out for commercial vessels breaking environmental rules. But perhaps more importantly, they'll be making their way through our waters, visiting communities — people who have, at times, been the most neglected Canadians — and trying to establish with them that they won't be left behind this time.
As the HMCS Harry DeWolf's captain, Corey Gleason, told me, with emotion clear in his voice as he referred back to the forced relocations, Canada has a lot to make up for: "We've got a terrible history … They separated families, and that's not OK.
