By Michael Ganley -- Talking about oil and gas under the midnight sun A visit to the ninth annual Inuvik Petroleum Show

I remember the first time I felt like a Northerner. It was two summers ago and I was standing outside my house in Yellowknife, talking with a friend of my parents – we’ll call him Bill – who was passing through town. Bill was up from Ontario and had just spent a week on the Nahanni River. He waxed about the grandeur of it all and about how the NWT was some of the last great wilderness in the world. He wanted it (and I don’t mean just the Nahanni) protected from mining and oil and gas development.

After a few minutes I got worked up. The history of the North is one of southerners coming up and telling Northerners what to do, I said, and it hasn’t worked out so well. Why don’t we leave decisions about parks and development to the people living here? But what if they spoil it, he replied, leaving out the, “Just like we’ve done back in Ontario,” addendum. I said the North is desperate for a private-sector economy and besides, if anyone is going to do a decent job protecting the environment, it might just be Northerners – particularly aboriginals – who have an infinitely closer attachment to the land than city folk.

All of which is just a lengthy introduction to a column on this year’s Inuvik Petroleum Show, held in June. It was my first time to the annual confab, which for nine years has brought politicians, regulators, business people and regular folk together to talk all things Northern oil and gas. It was an eyeopening visit and not just because of the light blazing through my curtains.

This year’s conference was dominated by discussion of the delays to the Mackenzie Gas Project brought about by the excruciatingly slow Joint Review Panel, which is now promising to deliver its report in December. Ironically, nobody from the JRP was there. In hindsight that was probably for the best: They might have been stoned.

It was my first time seeing Nellie Cournoyea in full flight. “I like to cast blame as much as anyone,” said the CEO of the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation, “but we don’t know who’s the most to blame for the fiasco we’re in.” She criticized governments, regulators, the media and industry, admonishing the latter to keep moving along with permitting. “You don’t not buy baby clothes when your wife’s pregnant.”

Ken Coates, a history professor and dean of arts at the University of Waterloo, gave a passionate defence of the rights of Northerners. He pointed out that Canada is a Northern nation that doesn’t act Northern, and that it will only have a strong claim to sovereignty in the North when the communities of the North have a healthy economic and social climate. He perhaps answered my friend Bill’s concerns about wilderness by pointing out that the North could be a model for others to follow: the first place facing frontier resource development with a 21st century morality.

Former Newfoundland Premier Brian Peckford brought some relevant information to the table, having been the Rock’s leader at a time when that province was beginning to develop its offshore oil and gas industry. The success of Newfoundland’s work on that file can be seen in its recent move from “have not” to “have” status, as opposed to, say, Ontario, which has gone the other way. “Get ready now,” he said, and get ready to bargain hard. Neither Ottawa nor the developers want to give up control to the hinterlands.

Clearly, the people at the show are not just in favour of a pipeline, they are, in the words of one journalist, “true believers.”

Now canoeing the Nahanni is the closest thing I have to a lifelong dream and I rejoice at the recent park expansion. And yes, we do have tremendous wilderness that deserves protection: Let’s lock up the Thelon from development forever, for starters. But, Bill, that still leaves us with plenty of land and water for responsible development.

As Premier Roland said, we hear a lot of nice-sounding things coming out of Ottawa about the North, but it’s rhetoric we already know. What we really need are some decisions to be made and, sadly, we’re once again waiting for others to make them.

That’s really annoying. Back off, Bill. Let us make our own decisions. We sure as hell aren’t going to make a worse mess of things than you have.