4~ Wednesday, June 7, 1989 - North Shore News

Bos HuNTER

THE ARCTIC is probably the most astonishing feature of
Canada. Yet if most of us down south think about it at all,
it’s as the place where Santa Claus lives, or some such

drivel.

In political fact, the Arctic is
Canada’s great colonial hinterland.
It was captured i in the first place by
the signing of treaties with the
natives, the treaties consisting
almost ‘entirely of fine print. It was
the sleaziest sort of old-style
European imperial trick.

The native people of the Arctic
suffered the same holocaust as
their cousins below the permafrost
line: a roughly 90 per cent die-off
thanks to the introductions of
diseases, booze and guns.

When the treaties were signed,
some of them not until as late as
the 1950s, the Eskimo, Kutchin,
Hare, Dogrib, Chipewyan, Nahani
and Slave people of the North were
at their lowest ebb, and they didn’t
have lawyers or business advisers
at their.sides, as they sometimes do
today.

As a result, the northland was
thrown open to the gas and oil

engineers, the hydro dam builders
and the uranium miners.

Coming in the wake of the gold
seekers, who wiped out the
resource they came up to find in
just a few years, these modern
pillagers are driven every bit as
much by greed, or at least the
desire for profit.

And in the end, when they have
extracted everything they can,
they'll head home south, just like
the gold miners, leaving the entire
Arctic stripped of its natural
resources, as useless as Dawson
City, which survives on lurid
tourism promotion, and faded
memories.

The difference between today
and the days of the Gold Rush is
that the greedy men from the
south, especially the mining and
petroleum companies, are backed
up by government subsidies, which
encourage marginal commercial

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adventures that would otherwise
not be able to cope with market
Tealities.

The trouble is that everything is
owned by Ottawa.

Imagine having to deal with Ot-
tawa without provincial politicians
getting in the way. An awful
thought, eh? The mandarins of the
Rideau have undivided control
over the Northwest Territories.

found in the Yukor. and Northwest
Territories.

Simply put, they ar> being
squandered, sold off at fire sale
prices, virtually being tirown away
at a time when high wor'd com-
modity prices do not just’ fy enor-
mous investments in mineral and
fuel extraction in such a “‘remote’’
corner,

In the most appalling irony of
all, while the Mulroney regime
proclaims itself all in favor of
“sustainable development,”’ the
fact is that it continues to bankroll
exactly the kinds of nonsustainable
megaprojects that it always has in
the Arctic.

And while there was a lot of talk
for a while about ‘‘defending the
Arctic’ with nuclear submarines,
the central truth about life in the
North is that the enemy doesn’t lie
on the other side of the Pole, the
enemy — the conqueror and ex-
ploiter — lies to the South. It is

‘*..while the Mulroney regime proclaims itself all in favor of
‘sustainable development,’ the fact is that it continues to
bankroll exactly the kinds of nonsustainable megaprojects that it

always has in the Arctic.”’

Needless > say, the entire over-
continent (as opposed to “‘sub’’) is
being run with the efficiency of the
post office.

If that wasn’t tragic enough in
itself, what is at stake is something
far more important than the issues
that usually mesmerize the politi-
cians in Ottawa: nothing less than
40 per cent of Canada’s
nonrenewable resources are to be

Ottawa, representing all the
Southern Canadians.

I’ve been up to the High Arctic
and travelled over a fair amount of
the Northwest Territories, seeing
neccolonialism at its worst. The
native people are kept in line while
the resources are ripped off all
around thein.

Worse, today, we have the phe-
nomenon of Arctic pollution. By a

stroke of terrible fortune, it turns
out that major atmospheric and
oceanic currents travel northward
from the equator, redistributing
the Earth’s heat. Otherwise, the
poles would turn into gigantic
permanent ice cu'.:* and the
southern latitude. would become
blast furnaces.

The result is that pollution from
everywhere finds its way up to the
Arctic. Thus, Inuit women have
more PCBs in their breast milk
than anyone anywhere else, and an
“Arctic haze,” a chemical smog
from Europe and Russia, hangs
over the icefields, which appear to
have started to melt.

Perhaps most deadly of all, an
ozone hole has opened like a vast
lens over the North Pole, and if
Santa did live there, he and his
reindeer and elves would probably
have to be evacuated to save them
from skin cancer.

As things stand, the en-
vironmental assessment rules that
apply in Southern Canada do not
apply in Ottawa's northern fief-

om.

All that stands in the way of a
final overwhelming wave of
resource exploitation are outstand-
ing native land claims, based on
such slight proiection as the
treaties gave them, despite the fine
print.

What Canada should be doing
up North is settling land claims
generously, with a view to support-
ing local communities, not riding
roughshod over them, while at the
same time slapping a moratorium
on any further development @ —

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