John Thompson

Coles Notes on climate change

The footprint of Yukon’s glaciers shrank by 22 per cent over the past 50 years.

As far as glacial bleed-outs go, that’s second only to the shrinking glaciers of Patagonia and Alaska.

“That’s quite astounding,” said Lia Johnson, a climate change information analyst with Yukon College’s Northern Climate Exchange.

The finding was quietly announced by University of Alberta researchers in an academic journal last year. As far as climate change research goes, it’s a drop in the bucket, and easily missed.

That’s why Yukon College’s Northern Climate Exchange has provided a handy cheat-sheet. They’ve summarized the findings of more than 175 papers prepared over the past eight years.

The results are found in a compendium, available online, that describes everything from the breeding patterns of Kluane’s red squirrels to the growing prevalence of landslides, floods and wildfires.

No region in Northern Canada has warmed as quickly as the Yukon has over the past half-century. During that time, the annual average temperature has risen by 2.2 degrees Celsius. The average winter temperature rose by 4.5 degrees Celsius.

The Yukon hasn’t seen temperatures rise so quickly since the start of the Holocene epoch, 10,000 years ago.

Chinese coin presents riddle in Yukon bush

A 300-year-old Chinese coin discovered in the Yukon bush this summer is raising tantalizing questions about trade connections that long predated the Klondike Gold Rush.

Where it all started

FORT SELKIRK – Ione Christensen cups a hand to her ear and asks if anyone else can hear huskies howling.

It’s a fanciful question. No dog teams have been kept here for more than a half-century.

But there’s something undeniably special about Fort Selkirk. So, if there’s a place in the Yukon where you could hear a ghostly dog-team howling, this may be it.

Lose wolves, lose the wilderness

Bob Hayes has some advice for Yukoners who want to revisit the wolf cull: don’t bother.

“It’s completely not worth it,” he said.

Hayes worked as Yukon’s wolf biologist for 18 years, until 2000. During that time he helped design and deliver Yukon’s wolf control programs.

His conclusions? It’s costly. It often doesn’t work, and when it does, its effects are always temporary.

Bones discovered in Yukon tell tale of Klondike justice

Three Klondike killers have been unearthed in Dawson City.

On Nov. 4, a backhoe operator peered into the pit he was digging for the new sewage treatment plant and saw bones tumbling from the side of the hole. Human bones.

Three coffins were unearthed in a hurried, two-day dig. Historians agree they almost certainly contain the remains of convicts executed by the North-West Mounted Police during the fabled Klondike gold rush.

Their crimes occurred at a time when Canada’s northern sovereignty was reinforced with a hangman’s noose.

Good to be bad in Haiti

Morgan Wienberg is a bleeding heart. And a badass.

Bleeding heart? Well, how else do you describe someone who devotes her life to helping distressed animals and the world’s poor?

Badass is the more unlikely label. She was studious, shy, and a stickler for rules in school. She earned top marks and was class valedictorian when she graduated from FH Collins in July.

Then she went to Haiti, and started breaking the rules.

Asked to bring one sick child from an orphanage to her non-profit’s medical clinic, she’d bring back three.

She gave food to the goat-herders outside the compound’s fence, even after being warned to do no such thing.

She even smuggled kittens and puppies on to the premises, which was definitely not allowed.

“I almost got kicked out,” she said. “It was totally out of character.”

But the 18-year-old had spent most of her life dreaming of helping poor, overseas orphans. So when she finally arrived in earthquake-ravaged Haiti, Wienberg wasn’t going to let a few rules get in the way.

Affordable housing money lined politicos’ pockets

Nearly $3 million earmarked for affordable housing in Watson Lake appears to have been spent by Liard First Nation on acquiring three hotels, instead.

The First Nation justified the deal, made in June of 2007, by promising to convert part of one hotel into affordable housing for its members.

But, more than two years later, this hasn’t happened.

This raises big questions about the administration of the federal Northern Housing Trust program, which provided Yukon with a total of $50 million between 2006 and 2008.

Stuck with $20,000 medevac bill, man needs a hand, gets a kick

Sheldon Miller owes the territory $20,000 for a medical evacuation that doctors, nurses and administrators assured him he would not have to pay.

This is plainly unfair, Yukon’s ombudsman found after conducting a lengthy review of the matter. She’s repeatedly asked Yukon’s health department to forgive Miller’s debt.

It won’t.

Meet Yukon’s tiniest musicians

Ben Schonewille holds a songbird like a cigarette.

The bird in question is about the length of a cigarette, too. It’s a Ruby-crown Kinglet, one of North America’s smallest birds.

Its inquisitive head pokes out between Schonewille’s index and middle fingers as he carefully loops a tiny aluminum band around one leg.

Each movement is gentle and deliberate. Schonewille’s spent years learning how to handle songbirds in such a way as to not harm the fragile critters. The bird doesn’t stir.

Deputy disagrees with salary secrecy

Stuart Whitley, deputy minister of Health, wants to disclose how much he earns.

But he’s not allowed to.

Such information is public knowledge in most Canadian jurisdictions. But not in the Yukon, where the actual salaries and bonuses paid to top staff is a secret.

Only salary ranges are disclosed.

“In my view, these figures should be released,” Whitley wrote in a January 15 e-mail to Patricia Daws, commissioner of the Public Service Commission.

“We are paid out of public funds. Withholding the info makes us look nontransparent and defensive. I’m not happy about public finger-pointing and speculation but it’s a lesser evil than secrecy in government administration.”

Jimmy Ekho: The unchained melody falls silent

Iqaluit’s Arctic Elvis, dead at 48

Jimmy Ekho of Iqaluit, known to many as Arctic Elvis, died June 10 of lung failure. He was 48.

He was no near look-alike for Elvis Presley, as a diminutive Inuk with a whispy moustache, long hair and no sideburns.

But that didn’t matter once he donned his big, tinted glasses and his sealskin jumpsuit, complete with flared pants and an oversized collar.

Last call for Iqaluit’s boozy misfit magnet

“It’s done. It’s gone, it’s finished, it’s over with.”

The Kamotiq Inn was the dirtiest, greasiest, booziest restaurant in Iqaluit. After 28 years of service, it closed Thursday, May 8, apparently for good.

It will be missed.

It was one of the few places where poor families could eat out. Food was, as far as Iqaluit goes, cheap, with meals under $15.

It also enjoyed a reputation for letting customers drink the afternoon away at a table with an untouched plate of food. The broken blood vessels on the noses of prominent lawyers and politicians likely owe a great deal to the establishment.

And it was a magnet for misfits, of which there are many in this town, who could come in, no matter their dress or appearance, and feel at ease.

One small city's big language divide

If you speak only Inuktitut in Iqaluit, visiting a pharmacy could be life-threatening

To understand the importance of Nunavut’s draft language laws, look no further than the pharmacy in Iqaluit’s NorthMart.

There, elders who are unable to speak much English try to comprehend instructions, which may be of life-or-death importance, given by non-Inuit pharmacists, who resort to hand gestures and crude drawings while dispensing drugs.

No Inuit work behind the counter. No Inuktitut labels or instructions are provided. If elders don’t understand the well-meaning pharmacists, and are unaccompanied by family, their only hope may be that a passing shopper stops and helps.

It’s just one of many bewildering experiences that elders must encounter routinely in Nunavut, which English speakers may need to travel overseas to understand.

True north strong and drivel-free

Former cargo handler's poems deliver unflinching portrait of Nunavut's shame and splendour

I am tired of reading about an Arctic that resembles a snowy suburb of Disneyland, where polar bears - enormous teddy bears, really - frolic in the pristine snow beneath the midnight sun.

It’s the drivel you read in tourist publications and the travel sections of newspapers, all myth and romance, no grit. There are lots of spectacular, blue-veined icebergs in this place, but apparently not many people - other than the requisite hunter who crashes through thin sea ice, becoming a noble victim of climate change.

How refreshing, then, to discover Unsettled, a chapbook of poetry published by Zachariah Wells in 2004. Wells, who is from PEI, held the distinctly unromantic job of working as a cargo handler for First Air in Resolute Bay and Iqaluit on and off for seven years, and his poems describe a Nunavut that’s familiar to those who live here, which is rarely captured on the written page.

One good tern preserves another

Threaten one of these remarkable Arctic birds and you’ll soon be attacked by a bunch of its mates

RESOLUTE BAY - Mark Mallory walks with his head down as he’s dive-bombed by several small, white seabirds that resemble tiny pterydactyls when they’re upset, as they are now.

They shriek, stretch their tiny talons out and open their bright red beaks as they take turns swooping for his head. The air is full of shrill peeps and agitated kik-kik-kiks.

These birds are Arctic terns, demonstrating one of their unusual traits: group defence. When a perceived predator - whether a glaucous gull, or a Canadian Wildlife Service researcher, such as Mallory - comes near a nest, nearby terns take flight to help their besieged neighbour.

Where adults play spacemen

Seven grownups are spending the summer in the High Arctic pretending they’re on a Mars expedition

DEVON ISLAND - It’s odd seeing fully-grown adults dressed as spacemen, wandering the polar desert of Nunavut’s High Arctic.

But that’s exactly how seven space enthusiasts are spending their summer, from May to August, when they aren’t cooped up in the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station, a building that resembles several enormous tuna cans stacked atop each other.

Hoping to get lucky, ducky?

Male eiders hang around while females nest for the most selfish of reasons – it increases their chances of having sex

RESOLUTE BAY - It’s a most unusual way of protecting your children, but if you’re a female common eider duck, you don’t have a sharp beak or other weapon, other than what you’ve just eaten.

“Aww, she just shat,” says Mark Mallory with the Canadian Wildlife Service researcher as he approaches an eider nest June 5, shortly after the female flapped off.

His job is to count each stinky, slimy egg and take its weight. He spends a long time washing his hands afterwards, and even then, he can’t quite get rid of the smell.

“Peeyuh! Stinky bugger!” Mallory cries at another site. “For the love of God, look at this, there are chunks. It’s really repellent.”

Rebuilding remains of Thule settlement sheds light on ancient Nunavut culture

Archaeologists aim to restore plundered past

RESOLUTE BAY - No one has lived in the house for a long time.

Eight hundred years, Sarah Hazell figures. She’s a graduate student from McGill University, leading the excavation of an old Thule hut a few kilometres outside town.

The view was probably a lot better when the home was inhabited. Today, a front-end loader across the street scrapes and flattens burned garbage into the ground at the town dump, not far from the icy shore.

It’s July 10 and day one of a five-week excavation project. Right now, the hut isn’t much more than a mound in the tundra, marked off with ropes laid in a grid.

By the summer’s end, there should be a recreated Thule hut standing in the same spot, much like three other recreated sites that sit nearby.

How Greenland curbed alcohol abuse

Allowing beer, wine sales key to moderating drinking

Alcohol abuse causes tremendous damage in Greenland, just as it does in Nunavut and Nunavik.

But the solution chosen by Greenland’s government for its most remote communities is not prohibition, which it acknowledges does not work, and only encourages bootlegging and the binge drinking of hard liquor. It’s to ban hard liquor, but allow the sale of beer and wine.

The leader of the pack — now he’s gone

“He’s always looking for a good fight.”

Few can brag of visiting the North Pole once — but a crotchety old sled dog named Apu has been there four times.

Fewer still can claim to have accomplished that feat while living by this motto: “If you can’t eat it, and you can’t screw it, piss on it.”

Apu, short for Aputi, retired last month when polar explorer, sled dog trainer and Iqaluit resident Matty McNair pulled him from her team.

McNair has run sled dogs for more than 30 years. She says her job is like trying to control an unruly class of kids, each with his or her own distinct personality.

If so, she knows exactly the kind of student Apu would be.

“He’d be the troublemaker. He’s always been an asshole.”

No joy in Trashville

What’s the difference between Nunavut’s capital and a garbage dump? Not much.

Akeego Ekho, a 40-year-old grandmother, stands by the litter-clogged creek between the public health building and her home. For the past 16 years she’s pulled on her gumboots and waded in to clean up. In return, she says neighbours give her weird looks. When she asks why they don’t help, some even swear at her.

Plastic bags, coffee cups and blocks of styrofoam bob up and down in a river beside the expansion of the Baffin Regional Hospital. Garbage that washes into the bay either returns to shore or becomes swept out of sight by powerful tides, until it’s found in the stomachs of birds and marine animals that mistook the trash for food.

You can find dirty diapers on Iqaluit’s streets, mixed with plastic bottles, cigarette butts and other trash. Would you rather walk the streets of Iqaluit, or tour the landfill? It’s not much of a choice. This Environment Week, the capital of Nunavut looks like one big, sprawling dump.

The guys who went out in the cold

When a bunch of soldiers from the South try to survive in the Arctic, they screw up their igloo and catch fish too small to eat

A group of Canadian Forces troops have built a new kind of igloo. This one, well, wobbles.

The lumpy-looking snow house stands next to another, far more orderly igloo. To be fair, the first started as an oval, while their rivals used a circular design. But now the half-finished oval has acquired a tilt, its walls rising and falling chaotically.

“Elders can do it in about half an hour. We’ve been doing it all day. It gives you an idea of their skill,” says Master Cpl. Eric Viau, who smoothes another snow block on the wonky walls. Around him, fellow soldiers are placing bets on whether their igloo will stand by day’s end.

Viau is one of 84 soldiers from Gagetown, N.B., gathered outside Iqaluit at Iqalugaajuruluit, past Tarr Inlet, last Friday for a sovereignty operation dubbed “Glacier Gunner.”

It’s a fitting title for a mission that saw their powerful 50-calibre machine guns freeze, then break during firing practice.

Good thing the soldiers are accompanied by 11 Canadian Rangers. It’s no coincidence that the wobby igloo lacks the guidance of an Inuk, while their symmetrical rival has Sgt. Dinos Tikivik inside it, reaching to grab ice blocks passed to him by a string of soldiers.

“They’ve come a long way,” Tikivik says of the troops. “They only knew how to set up a tent.”

Life in the passing-out lane

Jean-Eudes Roy puts up with people who fight, urinate, vomit and pass out in his car. He earns $5 a trip.

Everyone has an ugly side. Jean-Eudes Roy’s job is to drive it home.

It’s approaching 11 on a Saturday night in Iqaluit, and Roy is one of many taxi drivers wheeling through the city’s streets, running residents to parties and bars.

Two young men climb in, bound for the Storehouse Bar. One reaches forward to shake Roy’s hand, wishing him a Happy New Year three weeks late. You can already smell beer on his breath.

“They’re very nice right now,” Roy says after dropping the men off. “When we pick them up in two hours, we need to be very careful.”

Resolute Bay: Arctic City of the Future?

A dome over Iqaluit? There have been stranger ideas

Think wooden posts lining the streets of Iqaluit is a far-out idea? Think again.

If urban planners had their way decades ago, Resolute Bay could have been built like a castle, with high walls surrounding the community to keep out wind and snow, and Iqaluit could have been encased in a giant dome stretching half a mile in diameter.

Ralph Erskine was one man who dreamed of designing the perfect Arctic community. Now celebrated as an influential architect, he died this March in his hometown of Drottingholm, near Stockholm, Sweden, at 91. A book recently published on his life includes pictures of his plans for Resolute, developed between the 1950s and 1970s.

One sketch shows hot air balloons and helicopters hovering over a new Resolute, surrounded by a continuous ring of buildings several stories high. Another drawing shows trees growing inside a sheltered town centre.

“I think that’s just hilarious,” said Ralph Alexander in Resolute’s hamlet office, who says he wouldn’t mind having a few trees in town.

Opening the secret bible of the Inuit

Lamech Kadloo’s seal-skin pants glint in the half-light as he watches the bullies at work. They grip their young captive by the shoulders of his parka, chuckling as they spin the child in tight circles until he collapses.

“Taima,” Kadloo shouts, thrusting his arms forward in a shamanic push.

Without being touched, the bullies tumble sideways and out of sight.

The bit of magic could belong in Star Wars, but this story likely predates the birth of Christ. In Iqaluit, where snowmobiles roar along city streets and ravens hover over a slushy, slowly freezing Frobisher Bay, filmmakers this week have just wrapped up the shooting of Kiviuq, a huge, sprawling epic passed down by Inuit over millennia.

It’s a story that was nearly lost. Until recently, some elders who knew the tale had not told it for an entire lifetime – a legacy of missionaries who warned that Inuit traditions were devil worship.

Nunavut's projectile pukers

Meet the fulmar, a bird with the most offensive defence

Pity the poor research students asked by Mark Mallory to clamber over the edge of a treacherous cliff to collect the eggs of northern fulmars.

Inevitably, the young researchers return with helmets and windbreakers covered with oily splotches that span the rainbow. That’s because the birds that inhabit the cliffs have one special defence mechanism: projectile vomiting.

“It can be bright orange to dark purple to green,” Mallory said. He’s studied the bird closely for three years, and he says that’s one of many reasons he’s fascinated by them.

Blooming time

Flowers flourish at Iqaluit's sewage lagoon

Iqaluit possesses a wide range of habitats, from flat sandy shores to craggy outcrops, that make it an ideal home for a variety of Arctic plants.

But the Nunavut capital’s growing population size could be another reason why plants flourish near the city.

“Want to see a lot of lush, beautiful plants in Iqaluit?” asked Dr. Susan Aiken, a botanist who has studied plants beyond the tree line since 1984, as she spoke to a group of about 10 who gathered inside the Nunavut Research Institute last weekend. “Head on down to the sewage lagoon.”

It’s sewage to some, but nitrogen-rich fertilizer to plants, and this boom in growth could be carrying its way up the food chain.

Recently Aiken spoke with Terry Dick, a researcher from the University of Manitoba who’s studying fish in the Sylvia Grinnell river. Excited that the fish have grown in size by about 30 per cent since his last visit, he told Aiken he wondered if global warming played a role.

“I said, well, the population’s gone up about that much,” she recalled. She then paused and suggested: “You’re doing your part just being here.”