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assessment that “large non-renewable resource-based projects and heavy infrastructure
development” had failed “to create a dynamic regional wage economy” in the North (ibid.: 122).
DiFrancesco suggested that the “panoply of economic development initiatives which had been
implemented” in places such as Canada’s Northwest Territories would not have the intended
developmental results (ibid.: 122), primarily because of the existing political context in which
regional development models had been conceived and implemented.
Over a decade later, large-scale resource extraction is still on the agenda in Canada’s
northernmost regions, but the development context has changed. The development landscape
has been supplemented by several major land claims agreements, like Nunavut and Nunatsiavut,
as well as the establishment of Canada’s Northern Economic Strategy, its Northern Economic
Development Agency and its roster of initiatives designed to encourage just such investment and
development. Still, the problems are similar with respect to the potential economic and
environmental legacy of extractive activities in the North, including the issue of oil and gas
development in the Mackenzie Valley. Richard Caulfield (2004) has observed that since the
1970s the context of development has clearly changed, as have the management practices and
overall assessment processes. The land claims have, by and large, been negotiated. Recent land
claims settlements in North America, and specifically in the Canadian North, have now placed
millions of square kilometres in the North, “in the hands of for-profit and non-profit entities
controlled by indigenous peoples.” These corporations, Caulfield notes, “control vast resources,
and they interact actively with both public and private resource governance institutions”
(Caulfield 2004: 122).
It is here, again, that a Canadian Studies approach to the North distinguishes itself. While IR
literature is generally concerned with the relationship between states and corporate stakeholders
in the Arctic (see Wegge 2011; Dodds 2010; Borgerson 2008), the Canadian literature is more
strongly focused upon the constituent parts which contribute to the Canadian state’s position in
the North (see White 2008