Sometimes I don’t know why Northwestel turns the internet back on.
It just lets tourists who are already here scare off the ones who haven’t boarded in Vancouver yet.
The latest digital warning to slip past the backhoe operators of Fort Nelson was reported by CBC News earlier this week.
Some travellers drove the Dempster Highway and — please stop reading here if you are a potential tourist planning a bucket list Yukon driving adventure — discovered that the Dempster Highway has “potholes, washboard ruts and loose gravel.”
A Toronto resident reported loose gravel and suffered a broken windshield. “It was the passing motorists that had him concerned,” the story reported, especially on loose gravel.
The Dempster was also alleged to have “a lot of dust.”
What kind of Top Secret Yukon beans will be spilled next? That the Eagle Plains Lodge restaurant doesn’t have a Michelin star? Or that if you time it right, you might get to share a room with someone else whose tires fell victim to the Dempster shale?
The CBC contacted the territorial government for comment, “but the acting director of transportation wasn't immediately available for comment.”
I suspect the department would have been more available to comment if the media had been asking to do a profile on how hard the highway crews work to keep the Dempster as safe as they can, in the face of tight budgets, aging equipment and some of the most extreme terrain and weather faced by highway crews anywhere.
Netflix should do a series on the people who go out in the dark at 3 a.m. in howling Dempster winds at Forty Below to make sure food and heating oil can get to Inuvik all year round.
What disturbs me most about the whole episode is what it reveals about the woeful understanding most southern Canadians have about the principles of fiscal federalism. Of course we would pave the Dempster, if they paid more taxes and added a billion to our transfer payment.
Give us two billion and we’ll pave it in Canadian polymer five-dollar bills to be easier on their tires.
When I called Northwestel to complain about them turning the internet back on, they told me I had it all wrong. My Northwestel source, who I am allowing to remain anonymous since I am totally making up what they said, told me that Northwestel has been proactively intercepting this kind of story for years.
Remember the internet outage last month? That was to prevent a story with this headline from getting Outside: “Oakville man tenting with family in Kopper King parking lot disturbed by shouting and loud engine revving at 2 a.m.”
Apparently the man went on to say, “The gravel tent pads drained well, but it was like clockwork — every night at 2 a.m. the fights would start. I wish the government ran the Northern Lights schedule that regular.”
Apparently, some evenings strong language was used and pickup tires sprayed their tent with sharp gravel.
And remember when the internet got really slow when you were watching Christmas Vacation during the holiday cold snap? That was Northwestel’s routers quietly strangling this story: “Ottawa fashion influencer says going outside in the Yukon uncomfortably cold despite wearing Lululemon yoga jacket.”
The influencer was upset that the Yukon government website did not give a traveller’s advisory that doing the Yukon Arctic Ultra in running shoes could result in your toes being donated to the Sourdough Cocktail backup inventory.
“Why do they use a different temperature scale in the Yukon?” he asked. “It’s so confusing. Everyone knows Celsius only goes to minus twenty-five.”
Northwestel has developed a secret Yukon firewall modelled on China’s, using Artificial Intelligence to scan network packets for sensitive topics. Any mention of March being the month when melting snow reveals an entire winter’s worth of dog treasures along Whitehorse sidewalks is strictly verboten.
As is any mention of the time those nice Yukon Grade 1 kids in their cute little parkas talked the travel writer from the New York Times into licking a lamppost at Forty-Two Below.
We should all thank the firewall team at Northwestel for their service. But they can’t keep their finger in the digital dike forever. People are getting Starlink and can post their pert opinions on Yukon infrastructure to Instagram even when Northwestel turns off its Alaska Highway fibre.
We should probably just lean into it. In this day of pampered big city lifestyles, affluenza and post-consumerist angst, people claim they want “authentic.”
Well, a passing semi on the Dempster putting a rock the size of an egg into your windshield is nothing but authentic.
I have vague memories of once seeing an obnoxious Western travel reporter interview the deputy minister of Tourism of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug — you know, our friends from Yamal in Russia who used to compete in the Arctic Winter Games.
Asked something about the character-building nature of actually trying to visit Yamal, the deputy minister of Tourism was unfazed and simply said “The tourist who is afraid of Yamal is afraid of life.”
We should steal that slogan. It’s punchier than “Larger than Life” and, who knows, might even get us more tourists who don’t complain.
Keith Halliday is a Yukon economist and the winner of the 2022 Canadian Community Newspaper Award for Outstanding Columnist. His most recent book Moonshadows, a Yukon-noir thriller, is available in Yukon bookstores.
