Boom and Bust in B.C.'s Northwest
Six times a day, yellow transport trucks carry copper concentrate from the open-pit Huckleberry mine down the main drag of Stewart, B.C. They rumble past the pastel-hued tourist traps, kicking dust onto the windows of the recently closed Home Hardware store, en route to a dying deepsea port that 100 years ago was poised to become B.C.’s biggest.
Sitting in Temptation Bakery as the trucks roar by, John “Rooster” Olson, now in his early seventies, says he has seen the boom and bust come and go. Born in Saskatchewan, he started working in remote northern B.C. logging camps in the early 1960s, blowing his earnings on Vancouver’s skid row before heading back north for the next run. He has fished commercially and tried his hand at prospecting, too, but never has he seen things as bad as this. “Every industry I have worked in has gone down,” he says with a tired shrug. “I’m sure glad I’m not a young man trying to get going in this.”
Others in this town share his assessment. There is talk of the dirty ’30s, when Stewart was nearly abandoned altogether, and of the future as well; in two years the Huckleberry mine will be exhausted and the port’s last bulk-ore customer will be gone.
Yet in September 2008, B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell delivered hope to Stewart and a string of small towns set along Highway 37, more commonly known as the Stewart-Cassiar Highway, which cuts northwest through the rugged B.C. boreal forest in rough parallel to the Alaska Highway. The premier revived a decades-old scheme to extend the B.C. electrical grid into the northwest corner of the province, roughly following the existing highway to Bob Quinn Lake, within reach of numerous potential coal, metal and energy projects that today face an uncertain future.
“The communities in the north have a vision to further open their region to economic opportunities on a global scale, and today I want them to know that we share their vision,” said Campbell, who went on to cite a study predicting that the line would draw $15 billion in investments and create 11,000 new jobs.
With this single announcement, the premier joined generations of politicians, entrepreneurs and assorted madmen who have dreamed big about bringing economic development to this pristine, inhospitable, mineral-rich corner of B.C. that is bigger than some European countries.
Soon after the premier’s announcement, the world economy collapsed, and with it, the latest mining exploration boom that sustained businesses in Stewart, Bob Quinn Lake, Iskut and Dease Lake. It suddenly seemed that the power-line plan, which had been devised earlier this decade to accompany NovaGold Resources Inc.’s ill-fated Galore Creek mine northeast of Stewart, was destined for the trash heap of history, like so many other ambitious infrastructure plans of the past.
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