Guest Editorial: Canada's Commitment to Northern Science?

Abstract

News from the University of Alberta that the Boreal Institute for Northern Studies will either be closed or dramatically scaled down has shocked most everyone with an interest in the Canadian North. And for this there is good reason. ... There is much to condemn the decision, even if the provincial government of Alberta is largely to blame for the financial nightmares that forced the university's administrators to take such drastic action. The Boreal is among the last and most important northern studies centres of its kind in Canada. ... Canadians should not be fooled into believing that this is simply an Alberta issue somehow connected to the collapse of oil prices and the impoverishment of the government. The problem is really a national one that has its roots in the country's long-standing inability to take the bull by the horns and do something about our inherent northerness. Back in the Laurier years, for example, it was left for the most part to outsiders like Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Roald Amundsen to remind us of what we had in the North and what was potentially at stake. Occasionally, our government listened, but mostly it vacillated, as it did when the activities of the arctic whalers got out of hand and negatively affected the Inuit societies and the whale populations at the turn of the century. ... Canadian polar research never seemed to fully recover from the so-called glory years of the Stefansson era, as the decline of the Canadian Wildlife Service, the Arctic Biological Station and the various polar research institutes attest. ... Canadians get all fired up when the United States or anyone else intrudes on our northern territory, ostensibly because they believe that the North is the key to our national identity - .... Yet when the opportunity arises to really do something about it, to protect the North from foreign intrusion, to preserve the environment from industrial development, to exploit its resources responsibly, to better understand the North and the people who inhabit it, the enthusiasm wanes. ... With the decline of the Boreal, Canada moves one step farther away from being able to shape the course of developments in the North in a way that is most beneficial and in tune with the aspirations of the nation. [As a point of comparison, Australia's commitment to antarctic research is compared to Canada's commitment to arctic research].