Recently, Premier Cochrane used a press conference to chastise the federal government for the lack of infrastructure in the Northwest Territories.
A Senate committee did much the same earlier this year and a number of presentations at the Arctic Development Expo lamented how underdeveloped the Canadian North is compared to Scandinavia, Alaska and even Siberia.
Well, we’ve got Canada’s attention now.
Giving the people of the NWT a reason to come back after this is going to be a massive undertaking. The problems of the North, which we clearly don’t have the resources to solve on our own, are going to grow exponentially if the country doesn’t step in.
Sure, the upper-middle class who are committed to mortgages in Yellowknife, Hay River and elsewhere don’t have much of a choice, so long as the jobs that sustain those mortgages remain. But people who pay rent or live paycheque to paycheque are not as tied down. There is very real possibility many people could find a job, apartment or new path to follow in life during the month or more they’re under evacuation in Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg or elsewhere. Filling jobs in the NWT was a challenge before, it may become a critical problem for the economy going forward, especially considering the minimum wage only recently increased to $16.05 an hour, which is barely enough to cover part of rent and groceries in Edmonton or Calgary and not even close to a living wage in Yellowknife or Inuvik. But it’s not as if businesses in the NWT have buckets of cash to pay staff with either.
We are going to need a decades-long effort of development across the North to bring it back. The status quo is no longer acceptable, if it ever really was.
Having one of the largest untouched stretches of wilderness left on Earth is a vital part of Canada’s long term viability, but that doesn’t mean paved highways with wildlife corridors built into them should be off the table. More road access would allow for great mobility of fire fighting forces and people in general. Especially seeing how quickly we now know wildfires can move, our fly-in, fly-out communities like Norman Wells and Fort Good Hope are currently sitting ducks. As effective as the two-day evacuation of Yellowknife was, betting the farm on being able to airlift absolutely everyone out of a community in extremely short time is not a gamble any government wants to take.
Housing in the NWT was already at a crisis point before the North burned. Over half the dwellings are 30+ years old and the cost of utilities makes life largely unaffordable. An effort to construct modern buildings could reduce costs, protect from fire and smoke and revitalize the economy.
Canadians need to make a choice — do they want to be an Arctic nation or not? If so, that requires sustained development and wheelbarrows of cash. It requires a paved highway network connecting all mainland settlements. It requires year-round bridges where we currently use seasonal ferries. It requires federal oversight on pan-territorial assets like the Dempster Highway. It requires government offices like the Canadian International Arctic Centre in an Arctic community like Inuvik. It requires subsidies for wages to make it worthwhile to have a job and strict controls on rent. It requires solar panels on every rooftop — the sun doesn’t set for much of the year in Yellowknife. We’re ignoring free power. It requires more hydroelectric dams to conserve water and provide cheap electricity. It requires air filtration systems in every building — we’re obviously going to be dealing with smoke for the rest of our lives, so we should build our infrastructure to cope with it. It requires Northern grown and owned industries in recycling, manufacturing, information technology and telecommunications. It requires more fibre-optic lines for high speed Internet. It requires both centralized and decentralized government services, not just one or the other. Only then can we expect investors to see the NWT as a reliable place to put their money.
Canada has a chance to change course on a half-century of neglecting the Arctic. This might be its last opportunity.