By Peter Jickling, Photos by Cathie Archbould You could be forgiven for assuming Yukon College, perched on the Takhini Bluffs over Whitehorse, operated as a sort of Northern ivory tower. But the college is deeply plugged into the needs of the territory’s people and its businesses. In fact, remaining relevant is a matter of survival. “Our mandate is to serve the community,” says Terry Weninger, the president of Yukon College. “Everything else follows from that.”

Clarence Timmons has served on the board of Yukon College since 2000 and has been the chair for the last five years. He recalls a recent trip he made to Old Crow, home to one of the college’s 13 campuses. “As soon as school was finished, 90 per cent of the kids went to the college because the computers were there,” he says. “For Old crow it was the hub.”

Each of the community campuses plays a unique role. “That’s why in each community we have what’s called community campus committees,” says Timmons. “They’re made up of volunteers that look at their specific needs.”

Of course businesses in the Yukon also have needs they want the college to address, and sometimes these entrepreneurial needs overlap with those of the people.

“A mining company might come to us and say, ‘We need 10 people trained in chainsaw safety,’” says Timmons. In a case like this, the math is fairly straightforward: If Yukon College can provide ten people with this training, then there are ten jobs filled with local workers.

Timmons meant the above example to be hypothetical, but the truth is that mining companies are beginning to ask for more and more from the college. In 2010, mining exploration surpassed $150-million in the territory, and prospector Shawn Ryan’s gold discovery near Dawson City is expected to yield a mine that will be active for 30 years. According to the college’s vice-president of education and training, Karen Barnes, these recent events have instigated a paradigm shift in the way Yukoners view mining education. “Three years ago when I mentioned [increasing courses related to] mining, people said, ‘Yeah, yeah, mining comes and goes,’” she says. “But suddenly there is a shift in the mentality. I think this time people are realizing that mining has a longer sustainability.”

The shift has been so pronounced that it has caused the college to create a new department: The School of Trades, Technology and Mining. The college is in the process of hiring a dean for the new division, and the new course booklet, published in February, includes listings for the mining school.

It has all happened so fast that the vision for the new department has slightly outpaced the curriculum development, but Barnes and others are exploring different options. “I’d like to do a sort of two-pronged approach,” she says. “We could do some certificate or diploma programs to give people a long-term career focus, and then also do some job-specific training so we can get people into the workforce, into a job.”

Barnes expects that those interested in the career-oriented prong would receive a two-year diploma. “The first year would be a general foundation year,” she says. “[The college] would teach mining techniques and an introduction to mining with a focus on the geological aspects. The second year we would look at some specialization.” Such specializations may include training as a geological technologist or as a reclamation expert.

However the department ends up organizing itself, the end goals are the same. “Number one, it will provide a stable workforce for the mining industry,” says Timmons. “Number two, it will provide an opportunity for people outside the Yukon to come to the college.”

Timmons is just as enthusiastic about the new mining program as Barnes, and he wants to develop the curriculum by going straight to the source. “We want to go to the mining industry and ask, ‘What do you need?’” says Timmons. This type of close relationship with industry will tailor the college’s mining program to the specific challenges of mineral extraction in the Yukon, and this in turn will give Yukoners a leg-up in the job market. “We look at a place like Faro, where millions of dollars have been spent on reclamation,” says Timmons. “We should have Yukoners working up there.”

References to Faro leave a sour taste in the mouths of many, and one certainly hopes that the college’s new school will include classes designed to ensure that such an expensive reclamation is never needed again. But cautionary stories aside, Barnes says the mining education process is going “gangbusters,” and Timmons envisions one day being able to offer degrees in mining-related fields.

What’s striking about the way both Barnes and Timmons talk about the School of Trades, Technology and Mining department is their complete lack of trepidation. Though this represents the biggest collaboration between industry and education in the college’s 28-year history, both speak with confidence about its eventual success.

This attitude is due in large part to other recent successes in pairing the needs of the business community with the course offerings of the college. “Our relationship with local businesses has greatly improved,” say Timmons. “I think a lot of businesses now look to the college not only for putting on programs for them, but also to employ students who graduate from the college.”

In some cases this process of collaboration requires little more than a slight reorganization of elements that are already present. “We’ve gone after the idea of clumping courses together and putting them into a certificate,” says Barnes. “So you can take five bookkeeping courses and get a bookkeeping certificate.”

However, in other cases the college has responded to industry by re-introducing once defunct programs and making them current again. Among the most successful examples is the resuscitation of a surveying technician program. The college offered such a program in the 1990s, but it was cancelled due to lack of interest. In the last few years, however, as development in the territory has increased, demand for survey technicians surged, and the course was rebooted in the fall of 2009.

Carl Friesen, a partner at Underhill Geomatics, was instrumental in getting the program back on its feet. “I was part of a president’s committee on programming [for the college],” says Friesen. “We would sit around a table and discuss what was needed, and I indicated there was a need for a surveyor’s course.”

The addition of the surveyor’s course had an immediate effect on the composition of Friesen’s workforce. “Last year I hired three people from that program,” he says. “Before that, we were going across the country to look for employees.”

One of the advantages of the course, says Friesen, is that it is completed in a lean eight-month time frame. “It’s short, sweet, and it has its place,” he says, adding that the relatively short two-semester duration doesn’t impact the quality of the students who emerge into the job market. “They’ve performed wonderfully, and were educated well,” he says. “They’re three of my best employees.”

One of those new employees is Robert Pharand, a native of Montreal in his early thirties. Post secondary education has never really been his cup of tea. “I hadn’t been to school in 12 years,” he says. But despite some reluctance, the experience ended well for him. “I was really interested in what I was doing,” he says. “Without that schooling there is no way that I’d be where I’m at right now.”

Don Gillies has also seen his fair share of non-academically minded students come to Yukon College and flourish. He’s been a carpentry instructor in the trades wing since 1990. “The college is a good place,” he says unambiguously. “It’s good for the people and it’s good for the community.” But that endorsement is not to say that the college has remained a static institution in the previous two decades. In fact, Gillies has noticed a lot of changes.

“We’re a lot busier now,” he says. “Towards the end of the nineties the penny dropped and people realized that everybody’s retiring and there aren’t enough people to fill these construction jobs,” he says. “Since then, we’ve really ramped up, in particular we’ve ramped up our apprenticeship training.”

In order to keep the interest of his students peaked, Gillies has always kept an eye open for projects they can work on. His favourites are the ones that are on the leading edge of the construction industry, are socially valuable, or, in some cases, are both.

The Phoenix Rising project is a good example of such an endeavor. “I was approached by the Yukon Housing Corporation and Todd Hardy of Habitat for Humanity and we put the project together,” says Gillies.

Phoenix Rising is a three-unit townhouse on Wheeler Street in downtown Whitehorse. Habitat for Humanity was interested in the building because it would provide dwellings for three families. Gillies was on board because of the valuable experience it would provide his students. The housing corporation was keen because it provided a chance to experiment with super-insulated walls.

“Fuel prices went up to about $1.50 per litre and suddenly there was a desire all across the industry and in the general public to build more energy efficient housing,” says Al Lyon of the housing corporation.

In most of Canada, the minimum required R-value (a measure of thermal resistance in which the higher the number, the better the insulation) is R-20.

In the Yukon the minimum is R-28. The walls of Phoenix Rising are between R-50 and R-60.

Building such walls may initially be intimidating for some contractors, but Lyon insists there is nothing scary about it. “This was a pre-apprenticeship carpentry class that built the townhouse, and they built it with minimal problems or issues,” he says. The college decided to showcase the work on Phoenix Rising to the rest of the construction industry. “It became not only a hands on worksite for the college but it also became a demonstration site,” says Lyon. The housing corporation hosted two open houses at Phoenix Rising and attracted 110 people who were eager to check out the new insulation system.

Gillies says the opportunity to create a shift in mentality is one of the attractive elements of working on the project. “We wanted to change the culture of building a bit,” he says. He’s found that contractors are beginning to get on board with that change.

“The industry is looking at more energy efficient insulation, and with rising fuel costs and global warming it is now becoming apparent to pretty much everyone that it is the way to go,” he says. It’s a value that Gillies attempts to teach his students. “I am trying to instill a consciousness that there are ways in which we can increase the energy efficiency of these buildings, and that it’s a necessary thing to do,” he says. Phoenix Rising was just the start of that consciousness.

As Yukon College continues to emphasize research with Northern applications, its Yukon Cold Climate Innovation Centre is becoming an increasingly valuable asset.

“Our goal is to provide seed or matching funding to Yukoners who bring projects forward,” says Stephen Mooney, the director of the YCCIC. Gillies and the housing corporation have taken full advantage of Mooney’s invitation, and they became partners with the YCCIC in their quest for the perfect Northern insulation.

Under Gillies’ tutelage, six small sheds have been built on Yukon College property. Each shed has a wall that can be adapted with different types and thicknesses of insulation. These test walls are also outfitted with sensors that provide information about what’s happening between the outside and inside surfaces.

“The sensors are measuring two different things,” says Lyons. “First, they’re measuring temperature at different points in the wall. For example, what’s the temperature on the back of the plywood, and the face of the plywood? If we’ve got foam on the outside, what’s the temperature between those layers of foam? We also have humidity sensors, so we can measure the humidity in that wall.”

Both Lyon and Gillies have high hopes for this project. Gillies in particular is explicit about the goal of all this testing: “We want to design a wall system that is as easy or easier to build than what is currently being done [by contractors], and have it increase energy efficiency at the same time. If we can do that, then that’s just win-win.”

Gillies is certainly not the only excited person at the Yukon College these days, but there are those who continue to press the college to do more, to keep expanding its scope. In particular, the “U” word seems to get mentioned with increasing regularity these days.

Steve Cardiff has been a long-time proponent of increasing the number of university classes and degrees offered by the college. He was a member of the Yukon College board from 1991 to 2000, and served as chair for the final three years. Now he sits as an NDP MLA for Mount Lorne. He believes the evolution of Yukon College is not yet complete. “I would like to see it maintain its close link to the community and at the same time grow into a university,” he says. “It could pick a specialty that is relevant to the North.” According to Cardiff this will increase opportunities for Yukoners and make the North a more attractive place for scholars from across the country, and perhaps the world.

Barnes’s vision is more-or-less in line with Cardiff’s. “Traditionally students had to go outside [the territory] to get higher education,” she says. “We’d like to offer something here.”

At the same time she maintains that the university-college distinction is a false dichotomy. “We’ve seen colleges become universities and they haven’t left behind much of the college stuff,” she says. “It’s a different way of thinking about higher learning and that’s the kind of model that we want to emulate.”