Around dinner time on the evening of May 10, 2024, communication services in the Yukon—internet, cell phone, and landline—wavered, guttered like a struck match, and went out.
The outage was sudden and complete; every cell phone was bricked, every landline buzzed with a frantic dial tone, every browser, every bank machine and pay pad beeped in sad, non-operational confusion, their connection to the outside world severed.
Perhaps more urgently, all emergency services—911, fire, police, EMS, all systems tied to communication services—went down with it. If you needed help, you were on your own to get it. You either had to go to the police station or hospital yourself. Even when you got there, all internet-based services, like databases or diagnostics, would likewise be offline.
Easy access to information—not just email, text, and calls, but news about safety, infrastructure damage, and transportation delays—was likewise offline.
At the precise moment this occurred, I was bent over the tiny screen of my cell phone, having a beer with a friend visiting from out of town and scrolling through menu options for dinner. One minute they were loading, the next minute they weren’t. There was a brief pause in conversation as the tables around us slowly registered the same disruption. Above our heads, the speakers piping music—streamed, of course—into the pub crackled and abruptly went silent.
An article in The Guardian, by a Toronto-based writer, described what followed as “chaos quickly set[ting] in,” which is frankly hilarious, untrue, and exactly the reason publications should cultivate good relationships with journalists who live in the communities they’re reporting on, as opposed to phoning it in some 6,000 km away.
Communication outages are common in the Yukon (and the North in general), as our communications system, while slowly improving, is frankly delicate. In January of this year, several high northern communities lost all connectivity for several days due to a satellite malfunction, and I’m currently hot spotting because my cell phone is working but not my internet, which has been down for the last 12 hours.
The North does not have a robust, interconnected, multi-service provider network of communications services the way the South does. We have a janky patchwork of linear, interlinked services primarily supplied by one provider, Northwestel, with occasional and quite limited assists from private companies like Starlink—a system that spans thousands of kilometres of remote, often frozen wilderness, across which some 120,000 people are scattered, totally reliant on a handful of flimsy cables and distantly orbiting satellites to speak to the rest of the world.
It only takes one or two little things going wrong—malfunctioning software updates, hardware failures, fires, a careless backhoe operator, floods, landslides, even a beaver building a dam in the wrong place— to cause service interruptions.
If you live here, you expect this shit to break at least once or twice a year.
Ergo, what actually happened that evening in May when cell, internet, and landline service went dead was that the Yukoners in the room briefly conferred in companionable murmurs (a lone table of Vancouverites outed themselves by proceeding to freak out), determined that yes, internet and cell service was down, which was inconvenient, but certainly not abnormal, and proceeded to order another round of drinks.
When it became apparent the issue wasn’t going to be resolved anytime soon, the serving staff took drivers’ licenses and phone numbers and simply opened tabs for the diners to pay when service resumed.
These disruptions usually last about 12 hours or so, but when we received news that the cause of the outage was a raging forest fire burning out of control near Fort Nelson, B.C, burning a section of the fibre optic cable system to a smoking crisp, we adjusted our expectations.
It’s rather difficult to replace a fibre cable in a raging inferno. Over the next 48-ish hours, while it was cash-only for essentials like gas and groceries, many restaurants continued to run tabs. Every single one of which was paid, according to the servers I asked, anyways.
Emergency Medical Services (EMS) services were down, but outside of Whitehorse, EMS and evacuation services aren’t common anyways. When I got up the following morning, I received an update on the situation, and realized service would likely continue to be out for some time.
I shrugged, threw my back country medical kit in my car, and proceeded with my day. I’m Wilderness Advanced First Aid certified and a lack of emergency medical services qualifies as a wilderness medical situation.
How did I get that update, though? How did we know the outage was caused by a forest fire? How did we know to expect a lengthy repair time? How did we know we were not, say, at the slow, creeping beginning of a low-budget science fiction movie, about to be beset upon by the alien invasion already ravaging the rest of the world?
Because even when the internet and phone lines are down, radio—not Sirius or streaming, but good, old-fashioned, FM radio—works. In fact, when the communications systems go down, it’s the only thing that works.
Which means that CBC is the only local but interconnected—never mind standardized and unionized—information service in the entire North that functions without cell phone or internet service.
Which means that in an emergency—natural or otherwise—CBC is the only established, trusted system for information dispersal in all three territories, an area which, my dear little cheechako, represents about 40 per cent of the entire country.
Which means that when you talk about public broadcasting, you’re talking about the communication, safety, and security of Northern people and their communities.
Which also means that when you talk about defunding—even doing away with—public broadcasting, you’re talking about defunding—even damaging—the communication, safety, and security of Northern people and their communities.
Now look—I’m not going to sit here, as a Northern, working-class journalist, and tell you the CBC is an irreproachable jewel of democratic free press in this country. I’ve got $42.34 in my bank account: cigarettes are expensive, and I frankly can’t justify the cost of the butane and tobacco blowing that kind of smoke up your ass would take.
The CBC is in obvious and serious need of reform. I could not, in good conscience, refute this. I’ve worked as a freelancer for CBC, I’ve been interviewed by CBC as a source, I have friends and colleagues who work for CBC, and I will be the very first person in line to tell you it’s a bloated, inefficient system with a toxic, often deeply colonial and paternalistic work culture.
While there are many excellent reporters—especially young reporters—working for the CBC, the broadcaster’s rusty institutional structures and moldering, bourgeois values have led to an institution more interested in maintaining the status quo, empty virtue signaling, and making the white upper-middle class of this country feel safe, cozy, and unchallenged than doing what a national news organization is supposed to do.
What CBC is supposed to do is disseminate high-quality, well-researched, fairly reported news and information that holds accountability to power for public consumption in a reliable, standardized format.
The logical conclusion to this problem, however, is not to defund the CBC—any more than the solution to long wait times, doctor shortages, and poor access to services is to defund public health care. As we have seen with the rise of the fascist right, a healthy media ecosystem is essential to healthy democracies; Canada needs a healthy public broadcasting system now more than ever, especially in the North.
Frankly, economically and politically speaking, defunding CBC in the North is patently stupid. The private sector will not fill the void doing away with the CBC would create, nor would it do so in a way that would provide media services of superior—or even equal—quality, as is often argued.
That kind of thinking is inherently urban, Southern, and classist.
In order for that to happen, you’d need the customer base to support the new private services, which you might be able to get in dense urban areas, but you absolutely won’t find in rural ones, especially in the North.
There are private broadcasters in the North—Cabin Radio, for example, does great work—but the struggle to fund that work is a constant and ongoing issue.
Northern media has all the same problems with ad revenue and readership and balancing the books as everywhere else, with the added burden of serving huge territories with far flung communities in multiple languages in regions where the total population rarely exceeds 50,000 people.
While most communities have a local radio station, CBC—specifically, here, CBC North—is the only common denominator. There are approximately 134 radio stations in the territories, including weather, government-run information services, and private and public talk and news stations; of those 58 are run by CBC, and another 14 are CBC rebroadcast networks, meaning they rely on CBC for news and programming.
Added together, this means CBC North makes up a little over 50 per cent of the news and information not reliant on the internet in the North.
When you remove unmanned government info service stations, like weather and road conditions, that number jumps to about 60 per cent.
Without the CBC, the economic reality is that there wouldn’t be consistent, high-quality broadcasting services for the territories.
Likewise, to argue that defunding the CBC is the solution to the problems the institution is facing requires some fancy freaking footwork by the current pro-nationalist, “Arctic sovereignty”, “Elbows up” pundits on the right, howling for increased Northern military defence.
The North is a massive, remote region with unstable communications infrastructure, few redundancies, and a low and sparsely distributed population.
Defunding the CBC—which, again, is the only standard, consistent, reliable information source in the case of an emergency or service disruption in the North—when you are trying to improve military and public security is the very definition of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
The recently completed fibre optic upgrade on the Dempster Highway—a roughshod road that connects Dawson City, YT to Inuvik, NWT—cost more than $85 million and nearly 20 years to complete. I would be hard pressed to believe upgrading Northern systems to increase military security in lieu of public broadcasting would be a cost-saving measure for the Canadian government.
These—rather clear and rational—fiscal, political, and structural reasons to support the CBC in the North are important, as the calls to defund it actually highlight an underlying problem within the Canadian political mind. To the kind of politico who would defund the CBC, the “North” is worth investing in—but the people who live in the North? Not so much, especially when those peoples are First Nations. So much has been said and is being said and will be said about the “value” of the North: to defence, to resource extraction, to critical minerals, to national identity. Those values, however, are being espoused by Southerners, most of whom have spent only a handful of days in the territory on fly-in-fly-outs, who don’t understand the unique cultures and communities that make up everything above the 60th parallel.
They come here either to take or to convince Northerners why taking is the right thing to do.
This mindset is, at its core, extractive and colonial, and fails to consider the impact of Southern decisions on Northern people beyond the access to Northern resources it gives them.
The communities most powerfully impacted by the loss of the CBC—and the safety, news, and connective systems it represents—would indisputably be First Nation ones, because those are the communities where those services are already the most vulnerable and underserved.
For example, the Yukon has been deep in the grip of a severe mental health care and addiction crisis for nearly a decade.
In March 2024, the Government of Canada announced $86 million in federal funding for health care—particularly mental health and addictions services—in the Yukon; at approximately 40,000 people in the territory, that’s about $2,150 per person. That looks like a fair chunk of change, until you compare it to the $250 million—$6,250 per person—the feds dropped on the Yukon Resource Gateway Project, which provides funding to build roads to improve access for resource extraction projects in the territory.
Put plainly, the feds are willing to spend three times more per person to pay for infrastructure that almost exclusively benefits private mining and exploration companies—private enterprises largely owned and run by outside people and businesses—in the North than they are willing to spend on the mental and physical health of the people who actually live in the North. That the profits those companies generate often come directly from the lands and resources of First Nations peoples—who have lower access to health care and suffer three times the average national suicide rate—says more than it doesn’t about the South’s relationship the North.
To defund the CBC in the name of the “national” interest is to dance to the same tune: even if you can make an economic argument for it, the people who would pay most dearly for the loss of the services CBC provides are Northerns, particularly Indigenous ones.
