It is definitely winter in northern Ontario, but winter road season has still not arrived.
And on Lake Temagami, there are fears that, for the first time ever, the ice road won’t open at all this year.
“I’ve been having the talk with people in the community about how we’ve got to just get used to the snow machine ride again, and this is probably how we are going across the lake this winter,” said David McKenzie, executive director of Temagami First Nation.
“I don’t think we are going to have the ice road unfortunately.”
About 245 people live on Bear Island in the middle of the lake, and during the winter, they depend on the ice road for getting back and forth to the mainland for everything from doctor’s appointments, to groceries to employment.
McKenzie said they need about 25 cm of ice for it to be safe for cars and trucks, but right now, there are spots of “very questionable ice” on the lake with only five centimetres.
The snowmobile path across the lake is open with a thickness between 15 and 22 centimetres, but McKenzie said it only opened in early January, when that usually happens before Christmas.
I realize that it’s their land and their reserve and it’s vital to keep their culture alive, but if it were me? There is no justification, not financial, not cultural, not religious, that would keep me living in a place like that.
I did some work in a community in NWT called “Fort Good Hope”. We hired some locals for labour and got to know them fairly well. After talking with them, we learned that they were sending their kids to Edmonton for school because there was no future for them in town (besides delinquency, arson, bootlegging alcohol, etc.). There was so little hope in the town that we started calling it Fort No Hope.
One of our labourers was particularly reflective, noting that sending his kids south to get educated was effectively the same intent as the residential schools. The difference being that he was their parent and not the government, and it wasn’t to a religious institution. Given the kids we saw running around outside at 4am banging on windows (lots of sunlight in summer that far north), it seemed like a wise idea.
The feds should be funding education on reserve so kids don’t have to move south, by themselves, to complete high school.
I knew someone who worked with those kids in the housing the bands rented for the kids in southern cities (keep in mind “southern” means cities like Thunder Bay, ON). She found more than one child hanging in their closet … because of the disgusting racism, the isolation from family and community, and the pressure to do well - no matter what - just broke them.
If the gov’t can help remote mining communities build high schools, why not in First Nation communities as well?
The Feds don’t help much for northern mining communities either. The north just gets shafted in general. Short term planning.
It used to be that, when a major deposit was discovered, a community was established there to support the mine. We have a long list of northern communities established this way: Sudbury, Yellowknife, Labrador City, Thompson… I could list dozens of northern centres that were kicked off due to a mine. Yellowknife is a great example of the community surviving mine shutdown and continuing onwards.
But new mining communities don’t get established anymore – not since at least the 60s. Now it’s fly-in, fly-out, or similar rotations. No community gets established. No economic growth happens in the remoter regions. This affects more than just the mines – but also native communities – as it prolongs and reinforces economic isolation.
Actually, read into Thompson, MB. It’s possibly the last major mining community to be established in Canada. There was initially a work camp on site, but the workers had a strike and demanded that they could live with their families, and school and such be built. Thompson popped up almost overnight as a real community. That just doesn’t happen anymore. Sucks for miners. Sucks for economic development in the north. Sucks for carbon footprint.