There’s no doubting that 2023 will be remembered for wildfires in the NWT – and the journalism most residents remember will probably be reporting that took place during that crisis.
Some of that work is collected on this page, but the journalism didn’t stop (or start) there.
An extraordinary amount happened in 2023. As the editor, it’s my job to write some of the news we publish and, more importantly, to read virtually every article our newsroom writes before it goes out into the world.
Compiling a list like this is always difficult, and I’m certain there will be reporters ramming pins into editor-shaped voodoo dolls once they get through this list. We produced more than 2,000 pieces of reporting in 2023 alone, and there will be important work I’ve overlooked here either because I missed it while going back through the archive, or because I was just plain wrong.
I have limited this list to around 25 individual articles, which is my compromise between wanting to select everything and realizing that if this list is a thousand items long, nobody’s going near it.
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So, in the knowledge that I’ve limited this to my personal selection of some of our very best work, I invite you to spend a little of your time over the holiday catching up on anything you might have missed.
Thanks for reading and supporting our work in 2023. We’re proud to serve our Northwest Territories audience. Mind you, here’s hoping for a quieter 2024.
— Ollie Williams
To me, our January reporting on the lack of school bus drivers in Yellowknife feels like a lifetime ago. There are still problems, though, and I suspect that parents in the city might feel less like this is in the distant past.
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We had the opportunity to hear from a school bus driver who called moments after quitting to explain why they had done so.
First-hand accounts can be crucial in helping an audience to understand all – or at least, more – sides of an issue. We have a whole webpage dedicated to ways to get in touch, particularly if you have something important to say but are worried about the consequences of reaching out to a newsroom.
“Man, the youth of today have it tough” is, generally speaking, a guaranteed hard sell for older adult readers (whether or not it’s true).
But when we’re increasingly asking young people for input on major issues like climate change, those people are entitled to ask in return: what are you actually doing with my advice? Or are you just asking me to say you asked?
We looked into that.
The NWT has sporting icons in events that most of the world’s population have never even seen.
Which is silly, because knuckle hop is a guaranteed blockbuster sport to watch live, and Chris Stipdonk is the Lionel Messi of knuckle hop.
Watch the video in this story, then tell me you wouldn’t watch this at the Olympics. I won’t believe you.
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The sudden closure of Blachford Lake Lodge, a jewel in the NWT’s tourism crown, was a shock to most residents – and certainly to the people who worked there.
Half a dozen employees who found themselves abruptly unemployed told Cabin Radio what had happened and how it had affected them.
In more recent news, the lodge appears on track to be sold to a Nunavut-based company.
There has been no shortage of drama in the NWT legislature for the past few years. This was a little different but toe-curling to watch at times: a debate among MLAs about how much they should be paid.
Normally, MLAs use a system where a separate panel makes recommendations on their pay, precisely to avoid this kind of unseemly public discussion where politicians have to say out loud how much they think they’re worth.
This time, that regular system broke down… and we got exactly the kind of horribly awkward speeches you’d expect.
Caitrin Pilkington (now at the CBC in Yukon) spent months researching this article for us. We knew the Northern Farm Training Institute south of Hay River had closed, but what the heck had happened to the institute and to its leader, Jackie Milne?
Piecing that story together took a long time but resulted in one of the standout pieces of reporting Cabin Radio produced in 2023, and one which I – from an editor’s perspective – felt did an admirable job of treating everyone involved as a human being.
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If you haven’t yet read it, find 20 minutes. I think it’s worth it.
In some respects, Caitrin’s reporting on the Status of Women Council of the NWT has echoes of the Northern Farm Training Institute. Both reports examine how an organization handled issues while being led by one person with outsized influence.
This article also examines some of the sensitivities around how research is conducted, handled and ultimately published in the NWT.
This is one of the first stories we assigned to summer intern Talar Stockton on her arrival in Yellowknife.
In my head, I think I had imagined a couple of days on the phone to mining companies sussing out who was doing what in lithium exploration east of Yellowknife, which appeared to be a bigger deal than usual this summer.
Instead, over weeks, Talar covered an office whiteboard in enough notes to look like an episode of CSI. The resulting reporting is as good a summary as I’ve seen of where the lithium industry is at, and is going, around Yellowknife.
Remember when one half-sunken houseboat was all Yellowknife had to worry about?
There is a lot happening in this story, in a way that I feel defies easy summary. Complex lives and the complicated dynamics of Houseboat Bay collided when one of the bay’s best-recognized houseboats began to fail.
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The CBC later ran a short update if you want to know what happened next.
Chloe Williams travelled to the Sahtu for this report on the way the food northerners rely on is changing.
Country food isn’t always what it was, often because the animals that might have been hunted half a century ago have gone somewhere else or their numbers have dwindled.
Chloe looked at the work taking place to help Sahtu residents learn to love – and butcher, and cook – muskox, which is not a traditional food source in many communities.
OK, so we’ve reached the wildfire part. Feel free to scroll down, I get it.
I will never forget sitting in my office at 7:30pm on Tuesday, August 15, listening to John Vaillant – author of a book dedicated to the Fort McMurray wildfire and how authorities responded – raise grave concerns about what he saw happening in Yellowknife.
The circumstances were not identical but, about five minutes into my interview with Vaillant, I was spooked enough to be packing the truck in my mind as I listened.
By the next morning, we were relocating half our newsroom to communities outside Yellowknife to ensure continuity of coverage. By that night, the city was under an evacuation order.
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There are dozens of pieces of work produced by my colleagues during the wildfire crisis that could make it into this list. Everyone at Cabin Radio worked their hearts out for the NWT through the summer, and I’m forever grateful to all of them.
Here, I’ve chosen a few that especially resonate with me now that I look back through the articles we published.
This one, by Chloe Williams on August 21, captured the extraordinary relocation of vulnerable Yellowknife youth to tiny Zama City in northern Alberta, and some not-obvious ramifications of that move.
Back in Yellowknife, our general manager AJ Goodwin was helping the wildfire defence effort in about a dozen ways – everything from driving sewage trucks to operating airlift buses.
I roped him in to help film a video that showcased what, exactly, local contractors were doing to protect the city from the possibility of an oncoming wildfire.
His work helped us to produce a video that I hope gave people some security that their homes might just be OK, and some understanding about what was happening back home. (We paired this with stories that used satellite footage to track the huge fire breaks as they were made.)
It’s difficult to be reassured, though, when you’re spending weeks watching wildfires dance around your home community – particularly if you’ve been evacuated multiple times in the space of a year or two.
Chloe spent time hearing from residents who weren’t sure they’d stay once the crisis was over, which is a concern we heard municipalities express multiple times.
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(If you ultimately chose to leave the NWT in the months following the wildfire crisis, or if you initially thought you’d go but eventually decided to stay, I’d be really interested to hear what happened. Please email me to let me know.)
Enterprise, of course, felt the pain of wildfire season more than any other NWT community.
Our work is ongoing to follow what’s happening in Enterprise, how the community recovers and the support it gets. Only a few days ago, we were interviewing the federal emergency preparedness minister about the way housing supports are working and whether that could be done differently.
Assistant editor Emily Blake produced this detailed initial account of what had happened to Enterprise (the lead photo alone is horrifying, to me). Our reporter Simona Rosenfield has since filed several important updates tracking the fate of several families as they try to rebuild – or leave.
We virtually never publish first-person reporting.
As you have probably noticed, we don’t run opinion pieces. You can’t send an article or a letter to Cabin Radio for publication. And our reporters, as a rule, don’t get to write from their own perspective.
We broke that rule for Megan Miskiman’s first-person account of fleeing Yellowknife and the consequent impact on her mental health. Megan left us in October, and I think this report was one of the most important things we published during the evacuations, because it helped us speak directly to some of the emotions thousands of people were feeling.
Chloe’s year as our climate science reporter ended in October. A month before she left, Chloe filed this extraordinary account of the Yellowknife residents who created a kitchen capable of feeding hundreds while the evacuation dragged on.
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The report is a tribute to the ingenuity of northerners while also examining the way in which well-meaning attempts to organize an emergency response can sometimes, at least in the view of some participants, create more obstacles than they remove.
I recall seeing one person post online that here they were, 40 weeks pregnant on August 16 in Yellowknife, absolutely terrified.
Most of us were relatively terrified even without the prospect of imminently giving birth. It’s difficult to imagine what it took to cope with that at the same time as everything else.
Emily examined the experiences of several pregnant northerners for this report on how their situations were handled, the support they received, and the things they wish had been different.
We are out of the wildfire zone. No more fire stories in this round-up. Thank you for persevering.
I had been guilty of overlooking, for months if not years, the pain being caused in Fort Simpson by what residents said was an inability to rely on the village’s one bank branch being open.
Simona delved into the issue to produce a report that explained what was happening and why it mattered. The bank subsequently reopened with more staff.
Maybe this kind-of counts as a wildfire story.
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With fires destroying communications in some NWT communities for days at a time, more and more residents and even government agencies turned to Starlink, the low-Earth orbit satellite network maintained by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
In one instance, the NWT government even drove a Starlink dish to Kakisa because there was no other way to get a message to or from the community.
Our reporter Aastha Sethi examined whether this year marked the tipping point at which Starlink became a conventional means of accessing the internet rather than an unusual choice.
More times than you’d imagine, our reporting is driven by people emailing us and asking: “Hey, remember that thing some authority said was going to happen? Well… is it still a thing?”
As it turned out, no, the sale of Yellowknife’s 50/50 lot for $1 to create 180 apartments was no longer a thing.
Nobody had thought to mention the quiet disappearance of this project off the agenda but, thanks to a tip, we were able to confirm it had been abandoned.
I did say there was a lot to report in the legislature over the past few years.
Emily produced this exceptional attempt at distilling four of the busiest, wildest years of NWT political history into one article.
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If it happened in the legislature during Caroline Cochrane’s government, it’s in this report.
Not long ago, teenagers struggling with their mental health might have found themselves inside a residential facility like Fort Smith’s Trailcross.
Now, a new approach is being attempted.
Emily and Simona travelled together to an on-the-land camp north of Yellowknife to see how that approach tries to help youth with traditional practices alongside counselling.
The year is ending with the NWT thrust into a geopolitical spotlight that hadn’t really been on the cards until October, when Nechalacho mine owner Vital Metals first raised the prospect of accepting investment from Chinese company Shenghe.
What happens to Vital Metals and to Nechalacho is important because Canada has repeatedly stressed its concern that China not be allowed to dominate global rare earths production.
Nechalacho is a rare earths mine, so Chinese investment there seems counter to all of Canada’s stated goals. What happens next? We’ll see in 2024.
