Guest Column (August 05, 1991)

At the turn of this century, Sir Wilfrid Laurier asserted that the 20th century would mark the coming of age of Canada as an economic power. Some 50 years later, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker espoused his “northern vision.” It led to construction of 4,000 km of northern blacktop in a “Roads-to-Resources” program, but little else. Perhaps the grandest vision of a northern industrial empire, and in hindsight the farthest from the mark, was presented by D.M. LeBourdais in 1956 in a book titled Canada’s Century.

LeBourdais was not an economist, but he was a noted writer on Canadian affairs as it pertained to the north. In his futuristic book, he says an industrial empire carved out of the north will require that we cancel the notion of the north as a wasteland and view the frontier in its proper light as

“one of the world’s greatest mineral

storehouses. Along with metals of the Canadian Shield and oil and gas beneath the Prairies, a northern-based empire would be fashioned from the immense agricultural lands, vast stands of harvestable trees, and an abundance of unharnessed electrical power.”

LeBourdais was quite precise in detailing the shape of the new north. “It comprises most of the Prairie Provinces and that part of the district of Mackenzie lying between the edge of the Canadian Shield and the mountain ranges. Its eastern

border — lakes Winnipeg, Athabaska, Great Slave and Great Bear. It has power (coal, hydro, oil and gas) and raw materials — the two chief requisites of industrial growth.”

To do LeBourdais justice, a sanguine view of Canada’s economic future was justified in 1956. Mineral discoveries in the early part of the 1950s came with dizzying regularity. There were enormous finds — lead and zinc near Manitouwadge in northern Ontario, another in the Bathurst camp of New Brunswick; nickel fields in northern Manitoba, iron ore in the Labrador Trough, and, most propitious it seemed, uranium, the key to the atomic utopia ahead, in limitless supply near Blind River on Lake Huron. Unquestionably, in the LeBourdais scheme, mining was a key engine of growth.

In a later postscript to The Mysterious North, written in the mid-1950s, Pierre Berton acknowledges that “in those heady postwar days, with new discoveries being hailed almost weekly, the north . . .s was also seen as the undeveloped treasure house of the nation, ripe for exploitation and profit.”

The north, however, has defeated every effort of expansion-minded Canadians. “commuter” mines, rather than mining settlements, and mega-projects, such as Quebec Hydro’s James Bay hydroelectric project and Beaufort Sea oil development (when it comes), which foster only temporary settlement, will be the hallmark of future development. These involve temporary incursions with a lifespan of little more than 10-25 years. Current examples are the isolated satellite mines, such as Polaris on Little Cornwallis Island and Lupin on Contwoyto Lake in the Northwest Territories, the very land that Samuel Hearne traversed in 1771.

But when the oil and gas wells are pumped dry and the gold and zinc blasted out of the earth, the beachheads will disappear, perhaps to be established elsewhere at a new find. And Contwoyto Lake and the other sites will appear, except for the flotsam of industrial society — rusting machinery, weathered oil barrels — very much like the harsh, pristine landscape Hearne confronted 300 years before.

Today, many would argue this is as it should be. LeBourdais was a smokestack visionary. He dreamed of unbridled industrialization, an anachronistic goal in a modern world animated by the concept of sustainable development and haunted by “greenhouse” gases and ozone gaps in the atmosphere. For a Canadian reading LeBourdais, however, there is a second pervasive irony. “Canada has all that is required in a material sense to make a country great,” he states. Even so, it can still languish, “for greatness consists of much more than material success.” And that, he says, is the ability to “act together for the common good.”