Idk about all of this. I grew up in a remote community and I haven’t lived there in a long time but I visit fairly frequently. About ten years ago an old gold mine that shut down in the 60s-70s opened back up. Basically everyone I grew up with who was never going to leave and isn’t on drugs works there now and is making 2-3 times as much as they were previously. They also fly people in to work, but they’re incentivized to hire locals because it’s so much cheaper and more reliable. The population has risen by over 20%, many people that left have returned.
There are more restaurants, more small businesses and houses are being built. When I lived there a lot of people did renovations but I only ever saw one house built—a house that had burnt down being rebuilt with insurance money. The town was long past it’s prime when I was young, there were plenty of cheap houses you could buy and fix up.
I remember there was a poster on the bank when I was a kid that had houses for sale on it. Houses for under $20,000. It’s not because life was so affordable back then, it was because the town was slowly dying. People moved out, nobody moved in.
That’s not the case any more. Now if you want a house you may need to build.
I agree with the part about all social systems needing overhauled tho.
There is truth in hiring locals when its close to town and skill sets exist. Most northern deposits are not close to towns and as result its not cheaper, nor more reliable. You have the odd one, say Meliadin for example. The result is an air charter, that hits multiple northern communities usually or workers have to travel from said community via air to the nearest major air-port when all the other mine workers are flying from and as a result its actually more expensive to use local hires. And the only time the air-charter option makes sense is if there's enough local workers in said communities, for instance ours right now is on a 3 week charter rotation. On reliability, we track no-shows for our companies at the airports, its not non-northern workers skipping flights because they got boozed up, its local hires. They get some money, they hit the bar since all our towns are dry and they miss their flight.
The north is an animal on its own, its nothing like the oilfields or Fort-Mac which I don't even consider northern. Inuks have very different values and unfortunately the amount of social assistance given without any performance requirement has really broken the will to work. Get your money from a quick rotation, quit job.
The only incentive is if the land-holder and subsurface rights older which is typically a band or inuit organization, forces mines to have hiring quotas via some workforce %. Even then though its often cheaper for mines to just pay out the penalty than loss of productivity using a non skilled workforce that just repeatedly quits on you.
I love my home, but I am not blind to the damage that's been done and even I have started to toss my hands in the air in frustration, the amount of free or paid training, the hundreds of job positions created, nothing I do on a daily basis seems to actually do anything to break this cycle.
I am eventually going to jump ship since after the past decade of seeing zero meaningful progress have concluded the only way to beat this thing is to give up completely on anyone 20 years and older. You have to fix the kids and convivence them they do not want to grow up to be their parents in social housing on social assistance. Need to build fitness facilities that have mentors for kids to idolize rather than their own parents shit life. Were currently pushing an average of a grade 6 literacy rate and a 30% graduation rate for men, of which is basically a freebie graduation rate because if you were to grade it based on a southern curriculum no one would pass.
All this to say, if life's shit an unlikely to change and remain a welfare state, people would probably rather be that under the Danes rather than the USA. So I understand it.
Don't even get me going on the level of protest against economic development in the north. My god how long did Baffinlands hearings go only to have Canada shoot it down in the end, 5 years or so? Expansion declined. The runways were blocked, everything and its the highest non -gov GDP producer in that Canadian Territory and even the MP was doing everything she could to get rid of it. Part of that is entitlement, we don't need work!
is in here. The AUS is all mining. Ingedenous must have figured out how to better take advantage there i'd think. I don't know how land rights work in AUS but presumably you guys have Impact Benefit Agreements in place for land access.
This post was edited by SBD on Feb 17 2026 02:42pm