Understanding the cost of True North

Canada nurtures its image as the True North. It’s right there in the national anthem. But most of us who live within 200 miles of the U.S. border have no idea of what living the slogan actually means and what it costs.

For real northerners, it means fighting to maintain services and infrastructure southerners take for granted: water, sewer, power and food supplies.

Take Pond Inlet, for instance. The Nunavut community of about 1,500 on northern Baffin Island was down to one working sewage-collection truck last week.

That is a crisis in a town that has lost its only mechanic, where a full septic tank means a home’s water system automatically shuts off, making the house essentially uninhabitable. And in a high-Arctic winter, it also means some of the underground tanks were freezing because their internal heating systems weren’t working.

The territorial government flew in a mechanic last Wednesday and by Friday one of the three broken-down sewage trucks was back on the road after its transmission was repaired, Darren Flynn, assistant deputy minister of community government services, told Yahoo Canada News.

The mechanic also looked over the remaining two sidelined vehicles, making up a list of needed replacement parts that will have to be ordered and flown in on an expedited basis.

The hamlet administration had already ordered new trucks, but they won’t arrive until next September when the annual sealift drops off a year’s supply of needed goods.

The trucks themselves are not cheap. Equipped with special heating systems to keep valves and pipes from freezing in an Arctic winter, they run up to $230,000 and have to be replaced every seven to 10 years, Flynn said.

He called the situation in Pond Inlet unusual. Run by a hamlet council, it’s had some problems, but other communities generally cope well.

“Communities are very well equipped,” Flynn said. “When you live in the North you have to be a little bit more conscious of logistics.”

The most comparable problem was a leaking water-reservoir cell in Arviat, on the western shore of Hudson Bay, during the winter a few years ago.

“We had to come up with a plan to truck water a significant distance back into the town to keep up.”

Difficulties common to northern communities

Such difficulties are familiar to every northern Canadian community and isolated First Nations reserves.

The Pond Inlet story is repeated elsewhere in the North, Sean Markey, an associate professor at Simon Fraser University’s School of Resource and Environmental Management, said.

Nunavut leader stands by comments about residents eating from garbage dump due to high food costs

Harper needs to step up on asserting Arctic sovereignty

Northern Canada was the scene of rapid post-war expansion, part of a federal policy to increase the scale of the resource economy. Communities were developed as bases for a stable labour force as opposed to transient work camps. They also brought more government services to northern regions.

But the 1980s brought slowdowns in resource activities and some withdrawal of government services. Markey, who has studied northern communities but not those in the far north of Nunavut, said companies that once helped sustain one-industry towns withdrew their responsibilities.

“What’s happened over the last 30 years or so is that infrastructure has just continued to degrade and we haven’t been either maintaining it adequately and certainly not in a comprehensive way replacing it with an eye toward the 21st century.”

Nunavut’s extreme remoteness presents especially tough challenges that have loaded costs onto Ottawa, which provides about 90 per cent of its funding, and has made it hard to attract resource investment to the 16-year-old territory.

Carved out of the eastern half of the Northwest Territories in 1999, it covers 20 per cent of Canada’s geographic land mass. But it has a population of only about 32,000 people – roughly the same as Campbell River, B.C. – spread across 25 communities.

About a quarter of Nunavut’s largely Inuit population live in and around the capital Iqaluit, on the south coast of Baffin Island, with the rest scattered in communities mostly dotted near the coast of Hudson Bay and the Arctic Sea.

Nunavut’s port facilities are rudimentary despite having the longest coastline of any jurisdiction in Canada and being dependent on summer deliveries by sea of most goods.

Iqaluit’s harbour, which receives the biggest annual seaborne supply shipment, is too shallow to accommodate the ship, so cargo is loaded onto small barges that are pulled into the city’s little port. Frobisher Bay’s 10-metre tides allow only eight hours a day for unloading, and that’s only when the weather’s good.

“It takes at least seven to 10 days to offload a regular supply vessel,” Nunavut Premier Peter Taptuna told Yahoo Canada News. “Down south it takes an hour.”

Of course there are no roads linking Nunavut’s far-flung hamlets. Cargo that isn’t delivered by sea in the ice-free months must come by air at sometimes astronomical cost.

Nunavut has only two paved airstrips

But the territory has only two paved airstrips, one at Iqaluit International Airport, which started as a Second World War U.S. Air Force base, and another at Rankin Inlet.

The rest are gravel strips that need regular, costly replenishment of the aggregate so they remain unusable.

“A couple of days of hard rain usually prevents aircraft from landing into these communities for two or three days or even longer,” Taptuna said in an interview from his hometown of Kugluktuk, in the western Arctic.

Most Canadians are by now familiar with food-price horror stories in the North, despite federal subsidies—the $26 carton of orange juice, seven bucks for a head of lettuce, $7 for loaf of bread. But doing anything is costly in Nunavut.

With tiny communities scattered across two million square kilometres, it’s hard to consolidate services such as health care (costly air medevacs for anything serious), social services, schools or transportation.

“Up here we need 25 of everything,” Taptuna said.

The federal government’s financial support of the territory has doubled in the last decade, from $854 million in fiscal year 2005-06 to $1.5 billion in 2015-16—about $40,000 per capita.

It’s enough to barely keep up with operating costs, the premier said, and leaves very little for improving infrastructure.

“For the most part we do have to go to Ottawa and get approvals for some of the bigger infrastructure-building items, such as the marine facility in Pangnirtung.”

For example, all electric power for Nunavut’s communities comes from diesel generators, some more than 40 years old.

“They’ve gone past their useful lifespan,” Taptuna said. “It’s coming to a point where it’s very difficult to maintain; it’s a high cost. It’s very difficult to plan for these things when it’s a struggle just to get funds to do that.”

Public-private partnership funds airport expansion

The territory is funding the $73-million expansion of Iqaluit’s airport via a public-private partnership with Winnipeg-based Arctic Infrastructure Partners, to be paid out over 30 years.

Things may change as Nunavut proceeds with devolution negotiations with Ottawa, which will complete the territory’s two-decade transition to a status more like that of a province or Yukon and N.W.T. in terms of control over its economic levers. It is already responsible for delivering health and social services.

The federal and territorial governments named their negotiators last October. Taptuna said he expects they’ll meet Ottawa’s deadline of an agreement-in-principle with a year.

“I think we’re on track,” he said, adding Ottawa’s chief negotiator also led the federal team on N.W.T.’s devolution talks and both sides have the Yukon and N.W.T. experiences as a guide.

Markey noted benefit agreements that follow in the wake of title and treaty deals potentially can result in massive wealth transfers that enable aboriginal communities with their own resources to enhance their social and physical infrastructure.

Successful talks should lead to Ottawa approving an increase in Nunavut’s borrowing ability for projects like the Iqaluit airport improvement.

“With the debt cap increase it’ll give us more ability to do more projects like that,” Taptuna said. “It is quite expensive, but at the same time if we waited another four or five years the price will probably double.”

The prospect of better transportation links to the south such as upgraded ports and airports, as well as improvements to other infrastructure, should attract more resource companies to exploit Nunavut’s treasure trove of minerals and sizable oil reserves, the premier hopes.

The territory currently has two operating mines; a gold mine at Baker Lake and an iron ore mine on northern Baffin Island. It already takes a lot longer to get mineral-extraction operations running in the North than the average seven-year period to bring southern deposits into production, Taptuna said.

Giving the territory jurisdiction could help speed that process and also ensure resource exploitation is environmentally sustainable.

“If a development is not going to do that, certainly there’s not going to be automatic approvals when we get to the stage of licensing and permitting of any development,” he said.

Nunavut has a couple of powerful allies at the cabinet table in the form of territorial native Leona Aglukkaq, the environment minister also in charge of northern development, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper himself, who makes annual trips to the Arctic.

But Markey said Harper’s interest in the North so far hasn’t translated into a systemic approach to northern development, or even a coherent vision.

“The process becomes more crisis-driven or politically driven in terms of where investments are made rather than taking a look at the big picture,” he said.

Taptuna is under no illusion Ottawa will open its purse, especially in a time of uncertain revenues. The challenge, he said, is to educate southern politicians and Canadians generally about Nunavut’s future economic potential in an era of climate change, and its part in cementing Canadian control of its northern waters.

“We’ve got to remember Arctic people are more or less asserting sovereignty for the rest of Canada. Most Canadians do understand that the North is an important place.”