A university in Canada's North?

Erin Freeland Ballantyne looks bushed. It’s not surprising for a woman who commutes between Victoria, where she’s studying, and the North, where her heart resides. The electric-smart 28-year-old was raised in a lodge north of Yellowknife, leaving for Montreal to get a bachelor degree, then to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. But she was magnetically drawn back to research her still-unfinished PhD in Fort Good Hope. And now, whenever she returns, Freeland Ballantyne pushes similar university opportunities for Northerners – in their own back yard.

She’s just emerged from meetings with the government about Dechinta, her game-changing idea. The word means “bush” in Dene languages, and this June, the bush will stand in for a university campus: Sixteen aboriginal students will descend on Freeland Ballantyne’s family lodge where professors and aboriginal experts will teach a specially developed Northern curriculum, and have it count as university credits. “We’re challenging people’s conceptions of what a university is,” Freeland Ballantyne says. “We’re saying, ‘This is what university and higher learning looks like in a bush-based environment, where indigenous knowledge and values are at the forefront of what’s going on.’”

Most of all, Dechinta intentionally puts a spotlight on 50 years of government malaise. The idea of a university in the North has been talked about since John Diefenbaker was prime minister. But the talk has never stopped. Ottawa and the territorial governments still have no official plans to build a university here, which, considering the region’s future of billion-dollar natural gas pipelines and international sovereignty disputes makes even a dropout snicker. Long viewed as the nation’s storehouse of natural resources, Freeland Ballantyne says it’s beyond time to focus on the North’s human resources. “The future of the North is all about the strength of its people,” she says.

To tap their strength, she and many others say we need a university in Northern Canada. The sooner, the better.


Whitehorse was the first Northern city to dream of a university but not the last. The idea sprung back in 1960, and spread to Fort Smith, Dawson City, Hay River, Tuktoyaktuk (imagine: “Tuk U” hoodies), Iqaluit, and Yellowknife. None succeeded, though in the late 1960s the Mackenzie Institute, in Inuvik, offered classes that didn’t count as university credits. Only the University of Canada North, conceived in 1969 by Richard Rohmer, a Toronto lawyer, impressed Ottawa enough to be seriously considered. Years later, after Rohmer ran out of energy and handed the idea to others, Department of Indian Affairs minister Jean Chretien deemed it “impractical.” And so it died, having never taught a student.

Rolf Hougen, a Yukon business lynchpin, was part of UCN. It complimented other projects he’d created, like the Yukon Research and Development Institute, which sought to collect economic data in lieu of the non-existent government agency doing so. Hougen saw a university as a tool to improve the lives of Northerners. “I always singled out the Indian and Eskimo people, as they were called at the time,” he says. “Their future was in the North. So if they were going to progress they needed an education base, and it’s pretty difficult to go south to get that education.” But today, Hougen feels UCN was too much, too soon, and backs education evolution, not revolution. That’s fitting, as he’s now chancellor of the territory’s college and that’s its goal.

The failure of UCN provided the impetus for the creation of Yukon, Aurora and Arctic colleges. They were seen as steps toward universities, and were aimed at stemming racial divides. In the 1960s, most Yukon students using territorial grants to attend university in the south weren’t aboriginal. As Amanda Graham writes in her master’s thesis on UCN, The University that Wasn’t, many white Yukoners “keenly wanted some inexpensive way of leaving the North.” For aboriginal people not wanting to leave there was no post-secondary education available before the colleges were established, in the 1960s.

How have they faired? In the absence of a university (or universities), the three territorial colleges have bridged the gap, to a point. All offer an appetizer menu of university degrees, and critics say they tend to produce workers for jobs rather than independent thinkers. Still, Terry Weninger, president of Yukon College, the most university-like of the trio, says students can receive bachelor’s degrees in environmental science, education and social work at Yukon College without having to leave, thanks to partnerships with southern universities. The college also offers a few master’s programs (but you’ll have to leave for those), and boasts 16 international students amongst the 220 or so enrolled in its degree programs.

Like Hougen, Weninger believes in moving the colleges step-by-step toward a university. It makes economic sense, and Ottawa seems to agree: The only explicit policy Indian and Northern Affairs has on the issue is in a 2008 report that recommends Ottawa continue to support the colleges “as the instrument of choice for developing expanded university-level degree programs” in the North. As Ottawa is a must-have participant in university projects, it seems one with bricks and mortar is officially on hold.

Enter the University of the Arctic. The three colleges are part of this virtual university, which launched in 2001 and offers a bachelor of circumpolar studies through online classes, tapping resources from more than 100 schools in the circumpolar world. To enhance their access and contribution to the University of the Arctic, the territorial colleges are seeking $2.5-million from Ottawa to improve video-conferencing. “What we want to get away from is going for hundreds of millions for infrastructure,” Weninger says. “The infrastructure that we need [for university courses] isn’t for buildings, it’s for electronic delivery of courses and programs. It would be good to have a live feed that could go to Pangnirtung, for example.”

But some see the colleges as obstacles, as the still-flawed first draft that policy-makers refuse to abandon. “To create a university in Canada’s North, I think we need a bigger vision than to expand the programs of the three existing colleges,” says Brian McCutcheon, a member of a university advocacy group in Yellowknife. While McCutcheon feels there’s a niche for the colleges, “almost all the programs offered are job related.” What’s needed, he says, is something much grander -- a world-class research centre tackling Northern issues, like climate change, energy projects, mining and marine biology.

The university curriculum being taught at the colleges is often imported from southern schools, says Kyla Kakfwi Scott, program manager with Dechinta. That leads to many of the same problems with cultural relevance students face when they take courses at schools in the south. And the colleges are also pursuing several targets at once. Daniel Vandermeulen, president of Nunavut Arctic College (and, it must be said, a firm believer in the step-by-step model) recounts a recent meeting: “Our topics ranged from basic literacy and how the college can support it, to how we can get more Nunavummiut to come back to school for academic upgrading, to trades training, to what we’re doing with university programs, to thinking about master’s degrees,” Vandermeulen says. “We’re very small in quantitative terms, but we’re very complex.”

While success stories are easy to spot (the Akitsiraq law program graduated 11 Inuit lawyers in 2005 though a partnership between Nunavut Arctic College and the University of Victoria, and Yukon College’s Cold Climate Innovation Centre continues to expand), many of these are one-offs. While Weninger sees a future where university research in the North is “directed by the North and administered by the North,” many ask how. How, with the colleges juggling so many balls and with large chunks of their budgets devoted to basic adult education, will this happen?

Where many want to shoot for the stars on a Northern university, the colleges, it seems, can shoot only as high as they’re able.


In N’Dilo, a First Nations community in Yellowknife, residents peer across an idyllic bay at Giant Mine, a graveyard of oxidized buildings and paint-peeled silos. Opened in 1948 and shuttered in 2004, the former gold mine was once an industrial engine of the North, but has since become its most shameful mess. While Giant’s buildings are in shambles, hidden below them in the mineshafts are hundreds of thousands of tonnes of lethal arsenic trioxide.

Ted Tsetta, the chief of N’Dilo, says Giant reminds him why aboriginal Northerners need a university that respects their ways while teaching outside knowledge. “If we knew 100 years ago, 90 years ago, that this was going to happen, if we had educated people back then for how mineral and exploration drilling can contaminate the water, the air and so on, we could have done it differently,” Tsetta says. “We had no say.”

Tsetta has just returned from Dene Nation meetings in Fort Simpson. There, he tabled two resolutions calling for the creation of a university in Yellowknife and for aboriginal treaties to be taught there. The ideas aren’t unique, but Tsetta says the process is: it’s the result of long consultations with Dene governments in the NWT (many university projects haven’t done this, and have died as a result); it’s supported by Shawn Atleo, the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations; and the resulting ideas will be tabled at an AFN meeting this July.

A university in the North will open doors for aboriginal people, Tsetta says, allowing people to become lawyers and doctors while also keeping their culture – living in two worlds, as they do now, but successfully rather than struggling. “On weekends, they could be out there practicing their traditional knowledge,” he says. “On weekdays, they could be in school studying what’s out there, how to protect the water, the animals.”

It’s an important point. Many reflexively ask why Northern students can’t just go south for university, and judge them when they do, and fail. But culture and tradition matter more to students moving from one world to another than they do to southerners, who live in a familiar cultural milieu. The University of Saskatchewan’s Greg Poelzer, author of Education: A Critical Foundation For a Sustainable North, writes that, “among those who do leave the North, many do not succeed in alien southern institutions because they have been separated from critical support networks. Bringing post-secondary education physically closer to where they live increases their opportunities to participate.”

Kirt Ejesiak agrees. No stranger to the public eye (he ran to be Nunavut’s MP for the Liberals in 2008) or to university (he went to Harvard) Ejesiak is part of Iliturvik, a group of five Nunavummiut pushing for a university in Nunavut. Much like Dechinta, and inspired by the small but successful government-funded university in nearby Greenland, Illisimatusarfik, the group hopes to see a culturally relevant school created in Nunavut that also offers access to outside knowledge. “I really felt, having an opportunity of having gone to the Kennedy School [at Harvard], why can’t we have a world-class institution closer to home?” Ejesiak says.

Studies have shown most university students in Canada attend schools close to their homes, and for Ejesiak, leaving was definitely a hurdle. “Major,” he says. “You know, [leaving] my partner and my newborn baby. And the cost.”

But Sarah Wright Cardinal, president of Aurora College, sees the situation differently. Wright Cardinal earned her master’s degree studying in southern Canada, the U.S., Europe and Asia, before returning to the NWT. There isn’t a university in the North, she says, because it’s not part of tradition here. “While in other parts of Canada there’s been a philosophical or cultural value of university education, in the Northwest Territories, people moved from a land-based bush life to structured communities in the last 40 to 60 years,” Wright Cardinal says. The transition from one world to another is still happening, she says. Over the next 18 months, Wright Cardinal is speaking with people across the territory about what they want to see next in education.

For many, though, that process just isn’t fast enough. “It’s been talked about for 20 to 30 years,” Tsetta says. “If we take things slowly, we’ll be waiting another 30 years. Now we have Aurora College. There’s a big building there. But let’s not give up on university programs. We truly need it.”


While the talkers have long talked of the stop signs along the road to a university – too few people, too much distance, too many different governments, too little support at the grassroots, too complex a political landscape – few have pondered the cost of not building one.

Imagine 100 Canadians enter a room in Toronto: Roughly six will have a university degree, 28 a trade or non-degree education and 65 a high-school diploma or less. Now, imagine the same room in Iqaluit, one that only allows Inuit inside: About one lonely Inuk will have a university degree, 78 will have a high-school diploma or less, a handful will have a trade, and the rest will have little formal education. The same room of aboriginal people in Whitehorse and Yellowknife will have a few more university grads and fewer uneducated, but the North still trails the national aboriginal average.

Now, include non-aboriginal people and prepare to be floored: The territories suddenly have the most highly educated populations in Canada. Why? Southerners have taken advantage of education where they grew up, and the lack of it in the North, taking high-paying jobs locals aren’t qualified for.
Northern students are generations behind the national average in literacy, high-school completion and university-degree attainment, writes Poelzer. These problems will only be solved by improving university access. “Notwithstanding the often-asserted platitude that the North is crucial to the Canadian identity, the region and its residents have long been neglected,” he writes.

Neglect costs dollars. While little research has been done on the cost to the North (what university would do it?), McKinsey & Company, an American research firm, recently studied the impact of that country’s education gap with better performing countries like Finland and Korea. It concluded that if the U.S. had closed the gap in the 1990s its GDP would be between $1.3-trillion and $2.3-trillion higher today. Education gaps create “economic dead zones,” write the authors – communities where poor schooling produces economically unsuccessful people “due to a concentration of low skills, high unemployment, or high incarceration rates.”

Sound familiar?

Low skill levels means the Baffin Regional Hospital in Iqaluit failed to meet accreditation standards. It means the NWT government, with an 18 per cent vacancy rate, is raising wages to attract more qualified workers from elsewhere. It means people forced out of one way of life aren’t allowed to participate in the one they must adopt.

The lack of a university in the North also means our Arctic experts are well-tanned compared to their international peers. As Poelzer notes, all seven other circumpolar nations have a university in their north. Our Northern research centres, on the other hand – the Arctic Institute of North America at the University of Calgary and the Canadian Circumpolar Institute at the University of Alberta – are thousands of kilometres away.

The need is also exploding: In the Northwest Territories, the population is growing 1.6-times faster than the Canadian average; in Nunavut, it’s growing 2.5-times faster.

A big question is who will pay? The jurisdictional overlap is hazy – Ottawa has an educational obligation to First Nations people, but the territories are responsible for education. All territories want anything that’s built to be in their backyards – a sure way to keep everything in limbo. But consider that, each year, Ottawa sends more than $3.5-billion to the territories in transfer payments. You begin to understand Tsetta’s frustration. “If they don’t teach people of the North to a higher standard . . . they’re just sending money North, right? What’s the return? The return is very little.”

While the North has been forced to subsist on 50 years of talk, several successful schools with similar challenges have proven naysayers wrong. Thunder Bay, Ontario, is home to about the same number of people as the territories. Likewise, it’s separated from southern Canada by huge distances, and much of its population is aboriginal. But the university there, Lakehead, is a success: It has 7,900 students, 2,250 staff and contributes an estimated $250-million yearly to the local economy. Then there’s the University of Tromso, Norway, at 69 degrees North. Since it was built in the 1960s, the city’s population has bloomed from 12,000 to more than 65,000. And then there’s the University of Saskatchewan, which has become critical to that province’s economic and social success, says Richard Florizone, vice-president of finance and resources. “I shudder to think of if we didn’t have a university with 20,000 students here, what that would mean for the local talent pool, for industry,” he says.
This is why many see now as an ideal moment to restart the push for a Northern university. Settled land claims have reaffirmed aboriginal rights over land, traditional knowledge is finding a foothold in business and academia, and Canada is gradually emerging from a colonial mindset toward aboriginal people.

The Toronto-based Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation recently paid for a study of university activism in the North, and has given Dechinta $100,000 in seed money. Vice-president James Stauch says its’ clear something is afoot. “There’s a kind of Jungian process at work, a collective unconscious,” he says. “A lot of grassroots initiatives are percolating. At the same time you have some pretty prominent national voices, like [Governor General] Michaëlle Jean, who’s mentioned [a Northern university] quite publicly a number of times.”

But can they overcome the neglect? Two years after the prairie provinces were hacked off of the Northwest Territories, they got universities; 50 years after the same idea was presented by Northerners, it still doesn’t exist. “We’re really at a point where it’s a disservice not to be encouraging and developing higher education,” says Freeland Ballantyne, as she talks of plans for Dechinta. “Until we’re having a real conversation and offering real courses with real credit, we’re just talking. The time for that passed long ago.”

Originally published in Up Here Business magazine.