Front Burner - As fires burn, N.W.T.’s premier calls out Ottawa

Episode Date: August 30, 2023

As wildfires burn in the Northwest Territories, premier Caroline Cochrane called out Ottawa for failing to respond to decades-long requests to address basic infrastructure gaps. And as the residents who were forced to evacuate know, things like safe road systems and strong telecommunication networks are essential for emergency management. Today we’re talking about how this lack of infrastructure combined with other barriers have affected access to vital communication on the ground. Ollie Williams is the Editor of Cabin Radio, an independent internet radio station and an online news service based in Yellowknife that’s become a beacon of information during the crisis. Looking for a transcript of the show? They’re available here daily: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Tamara Kandaker. We have been asking the federal government to address our infrastructure gaps for decades. It angered me that we have been pleading and begging to have the same infrastructure that people in the South take for granted. Not extra, just basic infrastructure.

That's the premier of the Northwest Territories last week talking to our colleagues at The Current. She's blasting the federal government for gaps in basic infrastructure, essential things that a lot of people in Canada take for granted, like safe roads and strong telecommunication networks, the kinds of infrastructure that becomes really important when out-of-control wildfires move dangerously close to a city. We are following breaking news out of Yellowknife tonight. Officials have announced an evacuation order for the entire city as a wildfire burns its way closer to it.

20,000 residents urged to evacuate their city. Some escaped on planes, others by road. The wreckage from charred car crashes still littered along the highway. Concerns are growing for southern communities, such as Hay River, where strong winds are fanning the flames. We lost comms, so we had no idea that the fire was even coming towards us. And it just showed up on our doorstep way earlier than expected. It is definitely not safe to come back to these communities. As fires continue to rage in the Northwest Territories,

today we're talking about how this lack of infrastructure, combined with other barriers, have affected access to vital communication on the ground. Ollie Williams is the editor of Cabin Radio, an independent internet radio station and an online news service based in Yellowknife that's become a beacon of information during this crisis. Hi, Ollie. It's great to talk to you. Thank you for joining us. Hi, Tamara. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for being here. So let's start with an update. So you and I are talking on Tuesday afternoon and the weather is not looking great. I know there are heat warnings for several

communities and wildfires are still burning. So can you give me the latest on the wildfire situation? I think the optimism gauge depends on where you live in the Northwest Territories. Yellowknife residents have just been told that the city is starting to call back critical workers. That's their term. critical workers. That's their term. It basically means anyone who didn't stay in the city through all of this, but is now being called back to the city in order to try to get things back going again. So those guys are being called back. And that I think is giving a bit of hope and optimism to Yellowknife residents that there's going to be a resolution to this sometime in the near future. If you're a resident of Hay River or Fort Smith, those are smaller communities. They're south of Yellowknife. The fire is right on the doorstep of those communities

still, and we have no idea when those people are going to be able to go back or even what necessarily there will be to go back to. Right now, things are probably about as good as we could hope for in terms of there haven't been that many structures damaged, but you're right. It's a really warm, hot week ahead. It's almost September in the Northwest Territories. It's still around 30 degrees in some of these communities. That never normally happens. And it's just keeping this fire season going. Right. At this point, it's still unclear when people are going to be able to go home. And what would you say is the feeling right now among people from the Northwest Territories, whether they're still there or they're still evacuated?

I think the feeling is one of frustration among a lot of people. I think the main thing to say off the top here is that experiences differ greatly depending on all sorts of circumstances. What is your accommodation situation right now? How are you paid? Are you living paycheck to paycheck? Do you have your own transportation? What are your normal living circumstances? And so there's a huge variety based on that in terms of how people's experiences are going. I think for the most part, people just want a clear sense of when am I going to be able to come home. There are all kinds of reasons why

governments feel like they can't provide that sense yet, even though in Yellowknife's case, they're starting to call some critical workers back. So there's just this groundhog day feeling of you wake up, it's another day, you're displaced, you're going to figure out the rest of your day, and you'll sit down in the evening, and there won't be an update on when you can go home. And I think people are stuck in that pattern. And it becomes hard to live that way after a while. I didn't get a chance to pack all my personal things, you know. All my documents and everything is back home.

I'm worried with money because it's really scarce right now. I think I got like 500 bucks in my checking account. That's all I have. You mentioned it kind of depends on your financial situation. And I saw on your website that people have been writing in to say that they're facing financial ruin. I wonder if you can tell me more about what you've been hearing from people about what they're struggling with financially. A lot of people are okay. And they're being looked after by families or they've got free accommodation from a hotel and from the evacuation centers and they're doing all right. They're

managing to make ends meet. Some people are just not in that situation. They are losing money because they're not able to do their normal jobs and they don't have an income as a result. And the supports that are being rolled out by the government of the Northwest Territories, they are gradually coming, but they're not huge. They're not quite as much, for example, as the government of Alberta would ordinarily offer evacuees. Different jurisdictions do different things. And only now are some application forms opening up for people to be able to get hold of some of that cash. So it's hard for some people to get the supports that they need on time. And that just adds to this frustration and this real sense of urgency that

I think some people are feeling right now. I need to get back home. I'm really not happy to be here. A couple of people said that they had to wait three days to get a hotel room. What I'm worried about is, you know what, we're here right now and if we have to wait three days, it's coming out of our pocket. We don't know if we're getting refunded. It's all up in the air. We do not know and that's just not knowing is the hard thing. Well, one hotel night after another after another, that's the cost we're going to accumulate, cost of groceries, all those things. What about the bills? I'm getting it home, even though I'm not living there. Yeah, finance is the biggest thing for me. So I think there's a real burning urgency among some residents to get home and try to get on with

their lives because it does matter financially. And there are businesses in the same boat who have had to close their doors for weeks. They were just about getting back to being okay after COVID. The tourism industry is a perfect example of this. Businesses that were just getting back on their feet were starting to have a good summer. Now they are the subject of evacuation orders. And now they're saying we're going to need thousands in government assistance just to be able to keep going. I wanted to talk a bit about the unique situation Indigenous communities are dealing with. I saw Cabin Radio spoke with an Indigenous leader who said that the government didn't really communicate with them during the evacuation and kind of left people to

fend for themselves. And I wonder if you can talk a bit about that and what you've heard from Indigenous people in the Northwest Territories and the aftermath of these wildfires. You've heard from indigenous people in the Northwest Territories and the aftermath of these wildfires. To give you an example, the leader of the Clinchar government is the Clinchar Grand Chief, Jackson Laverty. Now, the Clinchar government represents four communities west of Yellowknife with maybe four or five thousand people associated with them. But a lot of Clinchar citizens live in Yellowknife, hundreds of them. in Yellowknife, hundreds of them. And the key concern that Jackson Lafferty has is that this whole evacuation took place with nobody really placing a call to the Cleanchon government to say, we're moving hundreds of your people south and we haven't fully figured out how we're going to do that or where. And the Cleanchon government, first of all, says, well, we need to be a part of that

and we need to know where our people are going. And secondly, we could have helped if we'd just been clued into this a little bit earlier and we could have put some resource of our own into this and i think that is what is important because the bigger concern that is being borne out i think to quite a degree right now is that there wasn't a massively great plan in place for what would happen if yellowknife ever had to be evacuated. The NWT is used to evacuations. Certainly this summer, lots of NWT communities have been evacuated, but they're all much smaller. And then they all come to Yellowknife because Yellowknife is the default holding facility for evacuees that haven't got anywhere else to go. It's where the government is based and it has all the resources. No one seems to have ever really planned before for what happens if Yellowknife is emptied

out into a southern province. And then we have to keep having a government and keep providing services and figure out things really quickly for people. And I think that's what indigenous governments are concerned about, is that it's not almost as though they've been left out of a plan. It's just that there wasn't ever a plan in the first place and therefore no way of including that. Before we move on to talk about the infrastructure issues, I just wanted to ask about you and what you've been dealing with, because you've been reporting on these fires nonstop. But Yellowknife is also your community and you also had to evacuate to Fort Simpson. So this can't be easy for you. What's happened to your house? Do you know? I just checked the cameras at the house a moment ago

cameras that are normally there to make sure the dog is not eating the furniture the dog is not eating the furniture because the dog is 600 kilometers away with me that's the good news the house seems to still be there look my house is on the eastern side of Yarlknife it's on the side furthest from the fire if my house goes then there's not going to be a lot of city left to go back to the way things are right now i'm not overly worried about that i am in the same boat as every other evacuee

in terms of having been here for two weeks with maybe three t-shirts and a few pairs of underwear to choose from and would quite like to be home now but from a personal point of view i've been well looked after in Fort Simpson, this small NWT community that I've evacuated to. They've done a great job of taking care of me and I can, you know, have no real complaints. I will just be as happy as the next person to be back home when we can. Yeah, it can't be easy, but I am really glad to hear that. So I wanted to ask you about some comments that Northwest Territories Premier Carolyn Cochran made when she was interviewed by the CBC on The Current last week. She said

she's done begging for federal help to fill basic infrastructure gaps. And I wanted to unpack with you what she's referring to. What are some examples of how this crisis was complicated by a lack of infrastructure in the territories? part of that, if you haven't been to the Northwest Territories, might be harder to envisage. Everybody had to empty out down one highway south to Alberta or wherever else you wanted to go. And when you say highway, people might think of a six-lane motorway with plenty of room for cars. It's not. It's this tiny, tiny little road, one lane in each direction. And it's not even as though there's a center center line marked you just get out of the way of traffic coming in the other direction and it it verges on being a bit of a gravel road a dirt road in places it is a very very fraught thread of a road connecting yellow knife to the south and there is no alternative so all it would take is is one relatively bad

road accident in the middle of an evacuation order and you would have 5 000 vehicles backed up behind that and the consequences of something like that could be catastrophic in worse conditions this time around i think everyone was frankly pleasantly stunned that we managed to get thousands of vehicles down that highway there are only a couple of gas stations to speak of, over 600, 700 kilometers. There were huge lines at those gas stations, but everything worked. And people kept their heads while they were driving, which is hard when you've got to drive through a wildfire to evacuate, which is what was happening. And that all went off OK. But now, of course, we've got to get everybody back up that same highway.

And we're having to figure out all those logistics in reverse. So that is just one example. A second example is communications. In smaller communities like Hay River and Fort Smith, they each have a few thousand people living in them. They're five, six hours away from Yelena. They had no communications. Earlier that day, local officials had received word that a fire was heading in their direction, but was still nearly 100 kilometers away. Then, without warning, that fire arrived. We lost comms, so we had no idea that the fire was even coming towards us. And it just showed up on our doorstep way earlier than expected.

The local fire chief says the blaze jumped 80 kilometers in just two hours. The same wildfires that were threatening those communities also burned through the fiber line. So there was no cell service. There was no landline phone. There was no Internet. In order to tell people this is what has to happen, we've got to get you out. And in those communities for days on end, this outage lasted practically a week. For days on end, this outage lasted practically a week. For days on end, people were having to go door to door to deliver information to anyone left. And you can imagine how extraordinarily that complicates an evacuation when you can't use modern communications technology to pass on messages to people.

That is what the Premier of the Northwest Territories is talking about. These challenges, these issues that are not necessarily common to southern Canada or the United States or Europe, but are features of everyday life here. I am done asking for the infrastructure gap to be done. We are Canadians. We deserve the same quality of living and services that every Canadian has. So I am expecting the federal government to make the infrastructure gaps a priority so that when this happens again, if this happens again, that we won't be in a position that because of a lack of infrastructure, that we are worried about losing people's lives. The other thing that feels worth mentioning is that much of that road that you were talking about to get from the Northwest Territories to Alberta has no cell service either, right? So it's like hundreds of kilometers to get

to Alberta, which means that if something happens, you really don't have a way of getting help unless you have a satellite phone or something. This is why, frankly, some of the reporting that we were doing during this evacuation, I think helped is because we know that obviously as a local newsroom, we know there is no cell service. Once you head west of Yellowknife, you've got to drive through the wildfire. You're going to get an hour out to a small community called Betjikant. Then you're going to have a little slice of cell. Then you've got another 90 minutes, two hours of driving to a place called Fort Providence,

where you're going to be able to check in. And then you've got three, four hours more to get to northern Alberta and pick up cell service again. We know where those little checkpoints if you like are so a lot of our coverage while the evacuation was taking place was focused on what information can we give you at each of those checkpoints on our website when you check in to understand things like how's the next slice of highway looking what is the traffic situation like what's the gas situation like ahead of me is the fire on the highway looking? What is the traffic situation like? What's the gas situation like ahead of me? Is the fire on the highway right now? What is the smoke like? Things like that. So we were taking that information from residents as they got to each of those little checkpoints they were telling us. And then we were relaying that back to people behind them so that everyone would have the best sense possible of how they were going to get away safely.

And again, that is probably not something in many areas of Canada you would need to do in the event of an evacuation. But you're right, there is no cell service unless you've got a sat phone or a Starlink propped up in the back of the truck, which is what we used to try and stay communicating with our audience while we were evacuating, there's not a lot you can do. You're driving blind. You're hoping for the best. Right. And I should say that that highlights, I think, some pretty incredible work by you guys,

which we'll talk about a bit later. But these issues, they've been there. It's not like they were revealed by the wildfires. And even before these fires back in July, the premier was speaking out, saying the federal government isn't listening to those living in her territory. We're at a critical point. So it's nice to say that you care, but we need action behind those words. It's time for Canada to show they care about the most marginalized people. That Canada is forcing northern communities to go back in time. So what people don't understand is that the Northwest Territories is expensive already.

We keep getting funded per person. We are not getting ahead. In fact, Canada is actually forcing us to go back in time. Explain that to me. What do you think she meant by that? And what would people be shocked to know about life in the Northwest territories? My interpretation of that, and I'm not the premier, so I don't know if this is the correct one, is that there is essentially a time lag developing between Southern Canada and the North of Canada, where Southern Canada's infrastructure marches on and Northern Canadian infrastructure kind of mostly got built 40, 50, 60 years ago. And now we're just in this constant battle to have enough money just to maintain it, never mind develop it,

never mind add new infrastructure. And that only occasionally happens. And I think that is reflected sometimes even in things like power. A power outage in Southern Canada, sure, they might happen occasionally, but Southern Canada is on a great great big grid you can lean on a lot of neighbors for help with that if you want to in the northwest territories every community is on its own tiny grid pretty much even yellowknife is just powered by a hydro system and then there's a diesel backup plant and fairly frequently we have had summers where this has been a weekly event both of those those will go down and the city will lose power for half an hour, an hour, maybe two hours. There have been situations where Yellowknife has lost power for four, five, six hours in the dead of winter. And that becomes a real issue. In fact,

it's really interesting that if you look at the city of Yellowknife's emergency planning, there's actually quite a lot of planning that's been done for what do we do if we lose power in the dead of winter for an extended period? How do we do if we lose power in the dead of winter for an extended period? How do we keep people warm and alive? In fact, far more planning than has ever been done for what happens if a wildfire is on the doorstep and we need to get everybody out of town. So these are the crises that northern communities are used to having to plan for. And now, of course, it turns out there are more crises that we need to plan for as well. Right. And I should point out the response from the federal government here.

So the current asked Harjit Sajjan, the federal minister of emergency preparedness, to respond to Premier Cochrane's comments. I can assure you that our government does put the North as a priority. They do deserve all the infrastructure in the north as people have in the south. So that's the response from Ottawa. But I wanted to ask you about another comment Premier Cochrane made. She was making the case that in order for Canada to maintain control of the north, people need to live there and that people have been leaving because of some of these infrastructure and affordability issues that we've been talking about.

The price of living in the Northwest Territories has gotten so high because of the supply chain issues that we're seeing. People are leaving. We need people to move to the north so that we can ensure that the Arctic is safe. We can ensure that the Arctic has Arctic sovereignty, which means... Do you know anyone who's left or who might decide they're not going back after these wildfires? I think there are probably quite a few people having those conversations. Not anybody who has reached out to me and sort of said with any sense of finality, dropping a microphone, we're out of here and we're not coming back. But I certainly think there will be people having those conversations. It probably doesn't hurt from Alberta's point of view to essentially be giving people a multiple week trial period right now and allowing people to live in

Alberta communities for a few weeks. And there might be some people drawing comparisons with their lives back home and deciding what they want to do. If you live in Hay River, for example, 3,000, 4,000 people, they were evacuated because of a flood in May last year. They were evacuated because of a wildfire in May this year. And now they've been evacuated again by a different wildfire in the last two weeks. That's three evacuations in two years. There's a financial impact that comes with that. There's a mental health impact that comes with that. There's a mental health impact that comes with that. There's all sorts of stressors that build up when your life is being disrupted that many times. I've spoken to some Hay River residents who say, no, no,

we believe in our sense of community and we will keep going as a town. But I'm sure there are some people who live there who might frankly wish for a quieter life and wonder where to find that. life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cups.

Okay, so we've talked a bit about the infrastructure issues, but I want to talk a bit more about communication in the North. And we talked about this briefly last week on the show, but as someone who was there, I'm curious about what you saw around Meta's news ban on Facebook. How did it affect the way that information was flowing in the Northwest Territories through the course of these evacuations. on their phones, because of course, most of our coverage was written word through most of this. And they would then share those images on Facebook and Instagram, which that's still fine. As long as it's not a link to news content, as long as it's not a news publisher putting stuff on there, that still works. So those screen grabs went far and wide and helped a lot of people connect with what we were doing. And we have seen record traffic figures virtually every day for weeks now on our website. So there's no question that people who needed information were able to find it on our website. But there is a big media literacy dimension to this because not everybody is

fortunate enough to know enough about the internet to be able to just say, okay, well, meta isn't quite as useful as it used to be. These products don't really meet my needs anymore. I'm going to go find Cabin Radio's website. Some people haven't used the internet like that. They're not used to it. They're used to everything being on Facebook, and they genuinely do not know where to find news when that situation changes. And I do not think the change has been explained to people well enough. There are clearly dozens, hundreds of people in the Northwest Territories alone who don't understand what just happened and are still even now asking us questions, wondering where our coverage went. So it, Cabin Radio has been praised for being a source of essential information. And Olly, what have you learned about how people need their news delivered in a time of crisis?

They just need to know that they're not alone, and that there's some sense of what might be an appropriate course of action, or at least some information to allow them to make an informed decision. That I think there was a little bit of a vacuum in that at start. There were a lot of messages coming out. Frankly, the key message was get out of Yellow Knife, get out now, drive south, and we'll figure out where you go later. That's quite a scary message. So it became our job to just be with people through that and to make it very clear to them that they were among thousands doing this and we were all going to help each other

out. And here are your options. Here's where you could go for accommodation. Here's a page full of people in Alberta offering you somewhere to stay. Here's a page explaining what the latest on gas is. Here's a page explaining what the financial supports are like right now and the other things that you can maybe go and do or see to take your mind off this. All those little things that I think to some people maybe don't count as journalism because they're used to

calling journalism this investigative thing where you hold people to account and you crusade on behalf of people who don't have a voice. Yes, that's really important. And we do that. But just giving people as much information as we can give them in one place that they can rely on. I think that's a huge thing in a crisis like this. Okay, Ali, thank you so much for this conversation and for all of your work on this. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Tamara. Thanks, Tamara. All right, that's all for today. I'm Tamara Kandaker. Thank you so much for listening, and I will talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.