In early June, I read Charles Montgomery’s  ‘Happy City’ as an introduction to the 2014-2015 Action Canada theme of the growing importance of municipal policy. The book vibrantly describes development challenges and encourages us to design a tomorrow with healthier and happier cities. I imagined a year exploring urban economics and environmental policy and had difficulty understanding how the Northern Conference would fit. Why visit small communities if your focus is re-engineering congested living spaces?

After a week in Canada’s North, I understood how important this conference has been in helping me understand this year’s theme: big cities have an effect on small communities. Rural-urban brain drain is just one example.  Even our group of sixteen fellows has two locals from the Yukon who shared how their academic and professional journeys have drawn them far away from home. This phenomenon is one I personally live, coming from a small town in Northern Ontario.  No one who has gone on to higher education from my high-school graduating year has ever returned.

Our group also met with several accomplished Yukoners who have returned to aid the economic and social development of their small communities in Dawson City, Carcross and Whitehorse, creating lives without dissonance that are shaping the future of the Yukon.   Since flying out of Whitehorse, their examples have challenged the narrative I tell myself about never returning to Northern Ontario.

And so, however I end up negotiating my own time and space in Canada’s large cities, the Yukon trip changed my perspective on this year’s theme;  it has made it a truly national project, and has called on me to better contribute to the place I still think of as ‘home’.

– Jesse Kancir ’14