Inuvik, 1987

The town of Inuvik is located some 500 miles north of Yellowknife on the edge of the Beaufort Sea. Yellowknife itself is about 1000 miles north of Edmonton, Alberta. Inuvik is at the mouth of the Mckenzie River. The town did not really exist thirty years ago: the original settlement in the area was Aklavik, which was not appropriate because of annual flooding (check!) For some reason, being in Inuvik feels like being at the edge of the world. There is one more settlement north of here, Sachs Harbour on Banks Island, but it is small and far away. Inuvik has a population of three thousand (?). It is the regional centre of the western Arctic , and of the Inuvialuit, who number 15,000? and occupy five or six towns and villages, including Aklavik, Sachs Harbour, Paulatuk, Bathurst Inlet (?), Tuktoyaktuk, and Holman.

Inuvik is at the edge of the tree line, which cuts a diagonal swath across the North, from the northwest to the southeast. It sits at the mouth of the Mackenzie sedimentary basin. Because of its location, there has long been a strong suspicion that there are massive quantities of oil and gas in the region. Alexander Mackenzie, the explorer who traversed most of the thosand mile long valley named after him, found oil seeping through the surface like tar in the seventeenth century ( check ). Oil has actually been produced at Norman Wells at the mid-way point along the river, since 1928? Since the late nineteen sixties, billions of dollars have been spent on hydrocarbon exploration and development in the Arctic, with much of the activity ocurring in early eighties in the Beaufort Sea and Mackenzie delta region.

In 1984 I was working for the Canadian government department responsible for regulating all of this hydrocarbon activity. These were heady times: several large oil companies and some smaller ones were given generous government grants to drill for oil and gas offshore. My job was to analyse policy issues arising out of all this activity. I was thrilled at the opportunity presented to me, because of course I had already done some seismic work in the region, and Arctic oil and gas seemed to be where the action was. One of my duties was to coordinate the department’s response to a massive environmental assessment that had been done on hydrocarbon development in the Beaufort. My other main duty was to analyse the implications for the department of the land claim settlement that had just been reached with the Inuvialuit. The main stumbling block had been jurisdiction over the offshore, which Ottawa was reluctant to give up.

Unfortunately, I quit my job after only nine months: I simply could not stand working in an office in Ottawa where the windows would not open, with masses of paper in my in basket, as I watched people picnicking and cycling ten storeys below on the banks of the Rideau River. I wanted to be out there with them. I also had three levels of bosses who were all brilliant but lousy managers. The ‘capo di capo’ was so dumb that on his first visit to Inuvik he asked an aid what all those ‘Japanese’ were doing walking around town. No one had briefed him about the Inuvialuit, I guess. This, I might add, was before my arrival on the scene. And so one fine day I handed in my resignation. Alas, within six months of packing it in I was a Consultant to the government on circumpolar issues, and within another two years I was up in Inuvik evaluating the government’s performance in implementing the very same land claim agreement with the Inuit that I had worked on as a civil servant. Life takes strange twists like that. So there I was, up in Inuvik, where I had never managed to get as a civil servant ( although I did get to Yellowknife, NWT, Whitehorse in the Yukon, and Anchorage and Prudhoe bay in Alaska ). Unfortunately, by the time I reached Inuvik the oil boom had gone to bust: most of the companies, with the major exeception of Dome Petroleum, the biggest boondoggle of them all, had folded their tents and gone south. Dome was largely the creation of ? Gallagher, an American oil man; its Beaufort properties tended to be quite far offshore, where one was less likely to find hydrocarbons. They were also in the deepest waters, where it would be horrifically expensive and challenging to get the oil and gas out. Consequently, Dome engineers had to keep coming up with fantastic schemes to extract the hydrocarbons and transport them to market.

The government and the Inuvialuit had reached a land claim settlement in 1984, and it was my job to see whether the government was living up to its commitments. I was hired by Peat, Marwick to assist them in this task. They had got the contract because of their program evaluation and cost accounting work for the federal government, plus the fact that they had included me in their proposal because of my Arctic experience. On paper at least it was a nice fit. What the task at hand meant in practical terms was combing through the land claim agreement line by line, clause by clause, and determining what commitments were made. The next step was to find out what, if any, steps had been made to live up to them. This work was tailor made for me, because I had been analysing and disecting complicated treaties, laws and regulations for several years. The task was bound to be a challenging one, however, because the agreement was notoriously complicated: all sorts of boards and committees were to be established to manage wildlife, conduct environmental assessments and fulfil various other tasks. The assignment also involved a lot of interviewing in Ottawa, Yellowknife and Inuvik. This should have been easy for me, because I have a lot of experience interviewing people as part of my work.

In spite of all of this, I really struggled on this assignment. In Inuvik in particular, I could barely keep my head above water. I felt intimidated by the people I had to meet, and I felt a tremendous burden of responsibility to the people at Peat Marwick. They had trusted me for this assignment, to the point where I was appointed head of the northern study team. This meant that I was in charge of two of their female Consultants, plus a couple of local Consultants working out of Yellowknife. I was not used to this kind of responsibility. To top things off, we had a federal civil servant tagging along with us: she was about to commence negotiating another land claim with the Yukon Indians, and it was felt that she could probably learn something by taking a look at the experience with the Inuvialuit settlement. On top of all this, I was scared stiff I was going to flub it with the people we had to meet in Inuvik.

The Inuvialuit Final Agreement was quite a high profile agreement in public policy circles. It was the first comprehensive land claim agreement concluded between the Government of Canada and native people. The chief federal negotiator had been Simon Reisman, a former Deputy Minister of Finance in the federal government, who later went on to negotiate the infamous free trade greement with the United States. Simon was a cigar-chomping, big talking man, and it was well known that he had to engage in much horse-trading to get this deal signed, sealed and delivered. He also had to convince the Prime Minister of the day, Pierre Trudeau, that this was a good deal for all concerned. For their part, the Inuvialuit had been represented at the negotiating table by two people: Bob Delury and Nellie Cournoyea, both characters in their own right. Bob was somewhat of a legend in his own time: he was a white from northern British Columbia who had come to Inuvik years ago, and he was the brains behind the negotiations, which had gone on for years. There were all sorts of stories going the rounds about how Bob and Simon had had many a feud together, and how many of the thornier issues would be resolved in the wee hours of the morning over a bottle of scotch. As for Nellie, she had a reputation for being tough as nails. She was the daughter of a mixed marriage: Danish? Father and Inuvialuit mother, and had spent all her life in the region. She was the local member of the NWT territorial assembly, and went on to become government leader.

My meeting with the Inuvialuit was tense. We, the Peat Marwick team, had identified twenty-six tasks that were to be done to implement the land claim agreement. But we could not get anyone to be specific about how far the government had got in fulfilling their part of the bargain. We were not there to find out how the Inuvialuit had implemented the IFA: that was their own sweet business. And of course the Inuvialuit welcomed any opportunity they had to slam the feds: as far as they were concerned, the government was implementing things at a snail’s pace. Complicating things at the meeting was the fact that Bob Delury did not show up. No explanation was given but I suspected that he saw himself as an ‘eminence grise’; not being a native, he as presumably reluctant to speak on their behalf. For her part, Nellie Cournoyea was terse and abrasive, to the point where one big formal meeting with her and her cohorts was most unsatisfactory.

We spoke with several other officials in Inuvik, but we had the darnedest time getting hold of Bob Delury himself. I knew for certain that unless we buttonholed him our mission could be regarded as a total failure. He seemed to be going to great lengths to avoid us, in the hope that we would eventually give up and have to catch our plane down south. Eventually we did catch up with him, and he still tried to play dumb. But I knew that he knew where all the bodies were. When he indicated that he just did not have time for us, I suggested that we meet over drinks that evening. In so doing, I was acutely aware that I would have to account for my actions with Peat Marwick, who were squeaky clean accountants. But I felt it was all or nothing. I was hoping that this was an offer Bob Delury could not refuse, and I was right.

Drinking is a total obsession up north, and in Inuvik in particular: people stay up half the night getting totally pissed, and don’t roll out of bed until ten or eleven the next morning. Sure enough, he took the bait. So at around 8 PM four or five of us met in the local hotspot. Country and western music was blaring out of loudspeakers, what seemed like a hundred people were gyrating on the dance floor, and a drunken Inuit lady kept coming over to our table and asking if I wanted to sleep with her. Undeterred, me and my team got Bob to tell us what had gone on with all twenty-six of tasks we had to evaluate. He started slowly, but once he got into the swing of things we could hardly shut him up.

It turned out to be a fascinating exercise, because he knew the IFA back to front, and he had a knack for taking seemingly incomprehensible sections and reducing them to very simple propositions. He was very frank and, I thought, fair. Two hours and several scotches later, we had completed the exercise. Bob left, and the rest of us stayed until around 1 AM; we all got totally blotto, and the next morning I had a horrific hangover. That same day we caught our 707 back to Yellowknife; it turned out to be the airplane the Pope had flown on during his visit to the Arctic. There was a plaque on board commemorating that flight. This was actually the second time I had flown on that plane.

Our report was eventually accepted, and I went on to complete another assignment with Peat, Marwick the following year. So, they must have been reasonably satisfied with my performance. A year or two later I ran into the one and only Simon Reisman in an Ottawa hamburger joint. I struck up the courage to introduce myself to this ‘celebrity’ who almost every Canadian now knew because of his free trade work. When I asked him what he thought about the IFA which he had negotiated, he was characteristically candid and blunt. In particular, I wanted to know what he thought about all those darned boards and committees that had been set up. To my surprise, he himself thought there were way too many of them. Then I asked him if he thought the agreement was workable and would stand the test of time. He surprised me by saying that the Prime Minister had asked him the same thing. Pierre Trudeau had, according to Reisman, said “Simon, do you think this is a good agreement? Will it last, Simon?” Reisman said, “ You know, Prime Minister, I don’t think it will last; I think that the Inuvialuit will jump as soon as the first development proposal comes along”. Reisman was echoing the widely-held sentiment that there were not enough qualified Inuvialuit around to sit on all those environmental bodies, and that theywould not be able to withstand the pressure from developers awash in cash and promises of jobs and other benefits. More than ten years on, Reisman has been proved wrong: the Inuvialuit have been quite cautious concerning development. After my conversation with Reisman, however, I have often wondered about the far more comprehensive Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement which he went on to negotiate. He was under tremendous pressure to strike a deal there too, and the stakes were of course far higher for the country. What would he think of that treaty, eh?