Should British Columbia create a Ministry of Northern Affairs

Abstract

N ORTHERN BRITISH COLUMBIA is very similar to the northern parts of many other Canadian provinces and, indeed, many other parts of what are known as the circumpolar north, such as northern Scandinavia and northern Russia. It has a similar geology and climate, a similar dependence on the resource sector, and a similarly diverse population. However, in some respects the development of northern British Columbia has been out of step with the rest of the circumpolar north. This can be seen very clearly in the development of universities in these northern regions and in the development of bureaucratic agencies dealing with the north. In the 1960s and 1970s universities were built in several places in the Canadian provincial north. However, no university was built in northern British Columbia. Among the universities built elsewhere in northern Canada were Laurentian University in Sudbury (1962), Lakehead University in Thunder Bay (1965), the University of Quebec in Chicoutimi (1970), and the University of Quebec in AbitibiTemiscamingue (1975). This construction mirrored the similar development of universities in other parts of the circumpolar north at much the same time. In northern Finland the University of Oulu opened in 1965, in northern Sweden the University of Umea opened in 1963, in northern Norway the University of Tromso opened in 1972, and in the then northern USSR several universities opened in the sixties and seventies including Tyumen University, Syktvkar University and Kemerovo University. Some people must have been thinking of the possibility of building a university in northern British Columbia