Read the NWT newspaper that carried Mark Carney’s birth notice

Mark Carney will become Canada’s prime minister at a formal swearing-in on Friday, with an election expected to follow in the near future.

Coincidentally, Carney’s birthday is on Sunday.

His birth – on March 16, 1965 – was marked in an edition of The Norther, a short-lived daily newspaper based in his hometown of Fort Smith, NWT.

The same day’s edition of the newspaper, which appears to have been a single sheet of paper with news printed on both sides, carried a birth notice as follows:

“Bob Carney and his wife, Verlie, welcomed an 8 lb 11 oz son, Mark Joseph who arrived at St Ann’s this morning at 7:56. Mark arrived in the best of health to make a fine new brother for Sean & Brenda.”

To have a birth notice in the same day’s newspaper was quite an achievement in a small Northwest Territories town like Fort Smith in the mid-1960s.

That was made possible by Jim Whelly, who had founded The Norther to be the territory’s first daily newspaper, even if that meant just one piece of paper per day carrying whatever was fit to print.

According to an obituary following his death in 2019, Whelly was a Canadian Press reporter in Alberta who also worked for the CBC in Fort Smith. He held senior roles at the territorial government before retiring to Bridgewater, Nova Scotia in the mid-1980s.

The Norther only lasted for a few years.

By 1968, Whelly had told the Canadian Press the newspaper was up for sale as he couldn’t get it in front of enough readers to break even.

“The circulation barrier killed me,” he was quoted as saying in a Canadian Press report that ran in the January 17, 1968 edition of The Lethbridge Herald.

“I ran into it at 1,200 copies. The break-even point up here is about 2,400 papers a week, and I just didn’t have the equipment to handle that many. I was lucky to roll off 1,000 papers a week.”

However, the March 16, 1965 edition provides the only snapshot of life in Fort Smith on the day a future Canadian prime minister was born.

Carney’s father, Robert, was a teacher in the town at the time. (Dennis Bevington, a Fort Smith resident who went on to become the NWT’s MP from 2006 to 2015, remembers being taught by him.)

The family moved south to Alberta when Mark Carney was six. Though he wasn’t in the territory for long, he becomes the first prime minister born in the NWT.

Setting aside the birth notice, the main headline in Fort Smith that day was the athletic ability of the local students. A teacher is quoted as saying the school’s general fitness rating would “compare favourably with any school in Canada” after recent tests.

A tip of the hat to the late Barney Masuzumi and Rita Gauthier, who were namechecked as the most athletic students of the day.

Elsewhere, the territory’s Progress Conservative MP Eugène Rhéaume was reported to be continuing a tour of the South Slave.

A request for proposals sought contractors for 31 new housing units in Yellowknife, Hay River and Fort Smith, for use by federal workers.

In the classifieds, someone in Edmonton was trying to sell Siamese kittens to the good people of Fort Smith, while the Catholic Women’s League was planning a tea and bake sale.

The newspaper – which you can read in full here – is preserved by the NWT Archives, which offers a searchable online portal.

Not all archived materials are yet available online. In this instance, a resident (who asked not to be named) unearthed the March 16, 1965 edition of The Norther with the help of archive staff and sent it to Cabin Radio.