Source: Thomas R. Berger, Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland: The Report of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry. Vol 1.   Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services Canada,1977, pp 1-2.

Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland

This Inquiry was appointed to consider the social, environmental and economic impact of a gas pipeline and an energy corridor across our northern territories, across a land where four races of people--Indian, Inuit, Metis and White--live, and where seven languages are spoken. The Inquiry was also empowered to recommend terms and conditions that ought to be imposed to protect the people of the North, their environment, and their economy, if the pipeline were to be built.

Today, we realize more fully what was always implicit in the Inquiry's mandate: this is not simply a debate about a gas pipeline and an energy corridor, it is a debate about the future of the North and its peoples.

There are two distinct views of the North: one as frontier, the other as homeland.

We look upon the North as our last frontier. It is natural for us to think of developing it, of subduing the land and extracting its resources to fuel Canada's industry and heat our homes. Our whole inclination is to think of expanding our industrial machine to the limit of our county's frontiers. In this view, the construction of a gas pipeline is seen as the next advance in a series of frontier advances that have been intimately bound up with Canadian history. But the native people say the North is their homeland. They have lived there for thousands of years. They claim it is their land, and they believe they have a right to say what its future ought to be.

The question whether a pipeline shall be built has become the occasion for the joining of these issues.

In the past, Canada has been defined by its frontiers. In the words of Kenneth McNaught:

From the time of the earliest records Canada has been part of a frontier, just as in her own growth she has fostered frontiers. The struggle of men and of metropolitan centres to extend and control those frontiers, as well as to improve life behind them, lies at the heart of Canada history--and geography determined many of the conditions of that struggle. [The Pelican History of Canada, p. 7]

H. A. Innis insisted that it was Canadian geography and Canadian frontiers that made possible and defined the existence of the country. The nation's lines of transportation and communications were based on the St. Lawrence River, the Great Lakes and western waterways. French and British dependence on fish, fur, timber and wheat influenced the course of Canadian history, one staple after another drawing the nation from one frontier to the next. Innis refuted the notion that Canada's economy is simply a series of projections northward from the economic heartland of North America.

The French, the fur trade, British institutions--these have all played a part from the earliest times in the development of a separate community in the northern half of the continent. But it is a northern tradition that in large measure makes Canada distinct from the United States today. We share a mass culture with the United States, but it is Canada that has--and always has had--a distinct northern geography and a special concern with the North.

What happens in the North, moreover, will be of great importance to the future of our country; it will tell us what kind of a country Canada is; it will tell us what kind of a people we are. In the past, we have thought of the history of our country as a progression from one frontier to the next. Such, in the main, has been the story of white occupation and settlement of North America. But as the retreating frontier has been occupied and settled, the native people living there have become subservient, their lives moulded to the patterns of another culture.

We think of ourselves as a northern people. We may at last have begun to realize that we have something to learn from the people who for centuries have lived in the North, the people who never sought to alter their environment, but rather to live in harmony with it. This Inquiry has given all Canadians an opportunity to listen to the voices on the frontier.

In the past at each frontier we have encountered the native people. The St. Lawrence Valley was the homeland of the Huron and the Iroquois--they were overwhelmed; the West was the homeland of the Cree--they were displaced; the Pacific Coast was the homeland of the Salish--they were dispossessed. Now, we are told that the North is the homeland of the Dene, the Inuit and the Metis. Today in the North we confront the questions that have confronted Canadians before--questions from which we must not now turn away.

Should the future of the North be determined by the South? The question can, of course, be answered by saying that since 1867 the Government of Canada has not been satisfied to make such an answer, and has established this Inquiry to make it plain that the goals, aspirations and preferences of the [end p. 1] northern peoples should be fully explored before any decision is taken.

The choice we make will decide whether the North is to be primarily a frontier for industry or a homeland for its peoples. We shall have the choice only once. Any attempt to beg the question that now faces us, to suggest that a choice has already been made or need never be made will be an inexcusable evasion of responsibility.

The issues we face are profound ones, going beyond the ideological conflicts that have occupied the world for so long, conflicts over who should run the industrial machine, and who should reap the benefits. Now we are being asked: How much energy does it take to run the industrial machine? Where must the energy come from? Where is the machine going? And what happens to the people who live in the path of the machine?

It may be that, in the national interest, the gas pipeline and the energy corridor should be built. It may be that they should not. But we owe to the peoples of the North, and to future generations, a careful consideration of the consequences before we go ahead with such projects. This report is an attempt to set out what those consequences will be.