By Keith Halliday -- Failing to plan is about as useful as planning to fail. Our governments need to work on the vision thing.

What will the North’s economy look like in 2029? Are we building the foundations for that future, or just rearranging the deck chairs on a Yukon sternwheeler? All three territorial governments spend a lot of money on economic studies, forecasts and economic development projects. They have huge amounts of data, but have they pulled it all together into a clear plan that will guide decisions on budgets, infrastructure and priorities?

It is interesting to look back at what our elders did when they faced the same questions in the 1960s and ‘70s. Recently, former Yukon Commissioner Jim Smith asked me to have a look at the 1968 Carr Report, in which he and federal minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Arthur Laing, commissioned Dr. William Carr to evaluate the Yukon’s economic potential.

The Carr Report aimed to be a “comprehensive economic study” of the potential growth and viability of the Yukon economy. It looked at the economic context, the potential for the Yukon’s industries, and the infrastructure that would be needed. Carr looked at scenarios from the far-distant future of 1985.

The report set out a bold vision for the 20 years after 1968: a thriving, multi-resource economy offering lead, zinc, coal and iron ore to markets in Canada, the U.S. and Japan, as well as growing tourism and service sectors. To get there, the Yukon needed more roads and a railway; better education, health and social services to attract a stable workforce; better education for aboriginal people so they could participate more fully in the economy; more electricity; and clear government policies for the nascent forestry, agriculture and tourism industries.

The Carr Report’s predictions did not all come true. The Yukon’s population did not quadruple to 57,000 (it’s now 34,000). The standard gauge railway to the outside – as Yukoners call it – never happened. Neither did a lead-zinc smelter, iron-ore mines or giant coal-fired power stations.

But getting it wrong is the nature of the forecasting game. “I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensible,” said General Dwight Eisenhower, architect of the D-Day invasion of France. The existence of the Carr Report and its direction led to many of the things Yukoners take for granted today: improved highways, community airports, the road to Skagway, cheap and (until recently) plentiful hydro power, active tourism marketing budgets, and so on. Even as circumstances changed, Smith and his colleagues knew generally where they wanted to go and had thought through the facts and trade-offs.

Listening to the Northern ministers of today speak in Iqaluit, Yellowknife and Whitehorse, I get the impression they do not have a long-range plan. Many of them are doing useful work, but it’s generally incremental with a built-in assumption that the future will look a lot like today.

But that could be a very bad assumption. Are they thinking about 2029? Can we rely on such generous federal transfer payments for another 20 years? If not, do we need to double or triple our populations to provide the tax revenue to maintain our services? And how might we do that? What does climate change mean for us, including the amount of money we spend on fossil fuels for heat and transportation? How real is the potential of the Internet and new technology to open up new economic sectors in the North?

Serious thought about these questions might lead to quite different decisions by our governments. Should the Yukon government have looked at fibre-optic connections to the outside in the last few years, instead of spending millions studying a multibillion dollar railway to Edmonton? Should the NWT be pushing for micro-hydro and wind power? Should improving education outcomes be higher on the agenda?

The future has a tendency to sneak up on you. As Mr. Carr said in 1968: “If economic development is not carefully planned and rationally co-ordinated… the potential for economic growth will be significantly reduced.”

The three territorial governments should think ahead 20 years and identify the kind of economy they aspire to, thinking about how many people will be living in the North, how much less dependent we want to be on the federal government, and what the mix of resource extraction, tourism and knowledge-based industries might be. A vision like that would highlight whether our governments are investing today in the kinds of infrastructure – from roads to broadband to education – we will need to achieve it.