This is the first post in a series on the fiftieth anniversary of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, edited by Mark Stoller.
For the past few years, I’ve asked students in my undergraduate Arctic geography course to come up with a research question that will guide them in their independent study throughout the term. It’s not a hard assignment, but it’s not as easy as most students think. Those who struggle with it seem to have a hard time moving beyond what they already know – their questions read more as preformed conclusions with a question mark at the end. By contrast, those who do well embrace the element of not knowing, treating the question as a base for further inquiry.
In the years leading up to the Mackenzie Valley pipeline debate, many of the “big” questions surrounding large-scale development in northern Canada were framed by those in government and the private sectors as matters of technical facility. When discoveries of vast quantities of oil at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s North Slope were made in 1968, talk amongst industry advocates centred around questions of feasibility in constructing a massive pipeline network across the vast and ecologically, environmentally, and topographically diverse Arctic and subarctic regions. So it was with the proposal to run a large pipeline across northern Yukon and up the Mackenzie Valley, where it would link up with an existing network of pipelines in northern Alberta and then east to the midwestern and northeastern United States. It was, at the time, advertised as the largest industrial mega-project in the world.
That never happened, as we know. The Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry was established in 1974 to investigate the social, economic, and environmental impacts of the proposed pipeline, but instead of rubber stamping its approval, as some within the federal government had expected, the commission, led by Justice Thomas Berger of the B.C. Supreme Court, produced voluminous scientific, social, and most importantly testimonial evidence challenging the wisdom – and the financial sense – of proceeding with construction. More importantly, the Inquiry shifted the public and political discourse around large-scale development and “the North” in Canada. The Inquiry became an unusually broad instance of public self-reflection in Canada, one facilitated by debates over environmental protection, Indigenous rights, and the economic and ethical wisdom of resource extraction, which for so long had been a core component of Canada’s “northern” identity. Questions of could pipelines be built shifted to whether or not they should be.
*
*
*
In a way, the “big” questions posed by the Inquiry were matched by the operation itself. The Inquiry was an enormous, lengthy, and expensive undertaking, and an anomaly in the conduct of commissions of inquiry in Canada. Over three years, it amassed thousands of pages of technical evidence and hours of testimony in the process. Transcripts from the community hearings total nearly 300 volumes alone. Much of this was presented during the summer of 1975, in many respects the height of the Inquiry.
But the Inquiry was not the source of many of the questions that ran through it. These were being brought to the fore through a growing Indigenous political mobilization movement, comprised of young leaders who channelled momentum and intellectual inspiration from the Black civil rights American Indian movements in the U.S. in their fights for Treaty rights and self-determination. In the Northwest Territories (NWT), the pipeline push collided with the emergence of Dene, Inuit, and Inuvialuit representative organizations and on the heels of landmark rulings at the Supreme Court of Canada, which appeared prepared to reverse its long-standing position questions of Aboriginal title and rights. Dene leaders, buoyed by similar victories in the NWT courts, took the fight to the south, mobilizing public opinion towards support for inherent rights as spelled out in Treaties and recent court cases. In the process, they drew support from church groups, environmental protectionist organizations, NGOs, student groups, and an assortment of progressive-minded causes, many of whom saw parallels if not a causal relationship between southern consumption and the “big” questions of the north. The Inquiry, which toured southern Canada in 1976, became a platform through which these and other debates broke through into the public arena.
But in doing so, the pipeline debate also acquired a scope of significance that reached beyond Arctic and subarctic regions. In many ways, nurturing this scope of appeal and importance became the point of the Inquiry. “What happens in the north will be of great importance to the future of our country,” Berger was fond of saying. “It will tell us what kind of people we are.”1
Then there was the question of “we” – and who “we” was.
Southern Canadians, while animated to new degrees by questions posed throughout the pipeline debate, never quite got around to this question in the way they had those of energy consumption and environmental degradation. Matters concerning the constitutional rights of Indigenous Peoples, as understood and practiced by Canada, were still novel in the public domain, as were the language and understandings of colonialism articulated, in particular, by the Dene movement. Though widespread in the political discourse in the north at the time, these trickled into the national consciousness of settler Canada more slowly. Indeed, on revisiting Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland, the official report of the Inquiry, we see it is only in the final chapter of the first volume that the subject of Indigenous rights is addressed in depth.
Unclear from the Inquiry’s legacy, also, is the extent to which the Inquiry changed the political trajectory of northern development – a goal that was fundamental to the Dene, Inuit, and Inuvialuit causes. In the NWT, as the Inquiry came to a close, much of the optimism of the mid-1970s gave way to skepticism of government motives. The government of the (GNWT), which had only been established at Yellowknife ten years earlier, did almost everything in its power to evade any responsibilities to Indigenous organizations. The GNWT, commonly viewed by both Indigenous northerners and white settlers as the colonial arm of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, was unprepared to cede any of its power. Much of the momentum and spirit of unity of the mid-1970s failed to gain traction in the 1980s, when the “big” questions shifted from the pipeline debate to land claims settlements.
*
*
*
Fifty years is brief when considered against the thousands of years of Indigenous land tenure in the north, but it’s an unusually long life for the reputation of a government inquiry. Today, the Inquiry is recalled as an inspiration for environmental impact assessments and truth commissions such as the Qikiqtani Truth Commission, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.2 Why the Inquiry still resonates today – and the form that resonance takes – are questions still worth asking. In part, these are questions of the legacy of the Inquiry and its long shadow. But it’s also an opportunity to reflect on the making of an historical event, and centring some of the bigger questions of the Inquiry’s longstanding appeal to those of us who view the north from afar.
This series draws together reflections on the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry from a variety of angles and places. Over the course of the next few weeks, this forum will share insights from researchers, teachers, archivists, and documentarians, all of whom, in one way or another, have broached some of the big questions that the Inquiry inspired. While some contributions examine of the history of the Inquiry through parallel movements in environmental protection, Indigenous rights, and modernist planning, others contemplate its significance today as a tool for teaching, learning, and reflecting on Canada’s history and the evolving place of the north within it.
Notes
- Thomas R. Berger, “The Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry,” Second Annual Corry Lecture, Queen’s University, 25 November 1975, RBSC-ARC-1031-18, Box 19-5, Thomas Berger fonds, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada. ↩︎
- Kim Stanton, “Truth Commissions and Public Inquiries: Addressing Historical Injustices in Established Democracies.” Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Toronto, 2010; Frances Abele, “The Lasting Impact of the Berger Inquiry into the Construction of a Pipeline in the Mackenzie Valley,” in Inwood, Gregory J, and Carolyn M. Johns. Commissions of Inquiry and Policy Change: A Comparative Analysis. University of Toronto Press, 2014. ↩︎
Feature image: Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry community hearing in Tulita. Credit: NWT Archives/Native Communications Society fonds/N-2018-010: 02816.
