The 1980s was a foundational decade in the development of a modern Yukon.

There were fundamental economic and political changes that we covered in detail in the Whitehorse Star that decade, though perhaps not with the understanding of the long-term implications that hindsight brings. I was privileged — perhaps just lucky — to be editor-in-chief of the Star through much of that decade.

At the beginning of that decade, the Yukon (we insisted on the ‘the’ back then) was just emerging from being an outpost of Canada ruled by Ottawa.

Yukon’s Indigenous Peoples were an afterthought at best in the corridors of power, though at least the destructive residential schools had closed.

In 1979, Indian Affairs Minister Jake Epp had issued instructions to Commissioner Ione Christensen to change from a role of essentially governing the Yukon with the advice of the territorial council to one akin to a lieutenant-government, a ceremonial role that left the actual decision-making to elected Yukon MLAs and a cabinet formed by the largest party. Christensen argued the change was too rapid and resigned. But the die was cast. So, through the 1980s, much of our attention at the Star was devoted to recording the decisions of the territorial legislature and government as it spread its wings, and detailing the ups and downs of Yukon’s political parties. That included that first self-government under Government Leader Chris Pearson and, later, the first premier who took that title, the NDP’s Tony Penikett. In the past 40 years, there has been a gradual devolution of power to Yukon, so today it can truly be said to be as close to a full-fledged province as possible without a tweak to Canada’s Constitution.

This was also the decade when the efforts of the legendary Chief Elijah Smith — who I had the privilege to meet and talk to on several occasions — began to bear fruit. In 1973, as leader of the newly formed Yukon Indian Brotherhood, he’d gone to Ottawa to present a blueprint for negotiating land claims and First Nations self-governance. Most of the groundwork for that was laid during the 1980s, through seemingly endless on-and-off negotiations and through several federal governments, under the then Council of Yukon Indians, a merger of the Brotherhood and other groups. As young, white journalists, recording these events and coming to grips with a historic cultural divide was a massive educational experience. I can still remember hearing the stories of Elders at the annual CYI conventions that were a mix of meetings, homecomings, celebration and large-scale camp outs.

In the first decade of these glacially slow talks, progress involved the basics of getting Ottawa to understand the importance the CYI placed on representing all of Yukon’s Indigenous People’s, not just those with “status” under the Indian Act. There were long waits as Ottawa wrestled with and eventually reformed its restrictive land claims policies. Finally, under the leadership of CYI chief negotiator David Joe, Chief Harry Allen, Chief Judy Gingell and many other leaders, an agreement-in-principle on an umbrella agreement was initialled in 1988. The Star recorded that with a big special section.

Looking back, it probably presented too much information without enough analysis, but it reflected our sense at the Star that this was history in the making.

I had moved on by the time that became a final umbrella agreement in 1993, followed by the process of negotiating final agreements with each First Nation, which only ended in 2006.

Between the structures and laws emerging from those many agreements and the devolution of powers from Ottawa to Whitehorse, the Yukon is not just a province in everything but name, but one uniquely structured to the needs of the territory. Of course, none of this has been without controversy.

As I have followed the Star since I left 35 years ago, I have watched as it recorded the ups and downs of that process, and the complaints of some about how bureaucratic governance has become. But for better or worse, and mostly better, it has made Yukon a modern, inclusive player in the Canadian political scene.

The 1980s also saw the start of a transition from a boom and bust economy to something far more stable and broad-based. After the gold rush and the building of the Alaska Highway, booms followed by busts, the Yukon in 1980 relied heavily on the lead-zinc mine in Faro. So heavily that the Cyprus Anvil Mining Corporation produced 40 per cent of Yukon’s GDP. So the shock was immense when it abruptly closed in 1982. It forced the Star (and the territory) to retrench, going from a daily to three times a week. It finally resumed production in 1986 — with enormous investment by Canada’s taxpayers – under Curragh Resources, and the Star again became a daily. The mine went under again in 1993, followed by a short reopening in the late 1990s.

The ups and downs of this economic engine forced Yukoners to develop a far more broadly based, self-reliant, and probably far more stable and future-proof economy.

The reopening under Curragh was one of the factors that finally killed any hope of revived operations to Whitehorse by the White Pass & Yukon Railway.

Curragh wanted to use trucks, demanding and getting huge improvements to the highway from Faro to Skagway, including keeping the highway south of Carcross open year round. But more important was spending by Ottawa across several decades, but mostly in the 1980s, to redevelop Yukon’s web of narrow and muddy or gravel highways into the all-weather hard-surface roads of today.

That redevelopment was covered by the Star in detail, of course, but I don’t recall thinking about how transformative this would be – possibly because it was announced one small contract at a time over many years. But without those highways, the massive increases in tourism and tourism revenue would not have happened. Small mines would have been more difficult to build and operate. And where before, essentially only Whitehorse had reliable year-round cargo transport through the railway, now most communities in Yukon could rely on trucks.

Besides these events that yielded hundreds of stories in the Star in the 1980s, there are single stories that readily come to mind today. Remember the Canadian Caper, when Canadian diplomats rescued, hid and engineered the return to home of six U.S. diplomats who had not been in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran when young Islamic revolutionaries took it over and seized hostages. The day after the news of the successful rescue became public, the White Pass train arrived festooned with yellow ribbons, a thanks to Canadians from our American cousins in Skagway.

There were, of course, sadder stories, such as the day a floatplane crashed into the trees after lifting off Schwatka Lake, killing six people. I hiked into the crash site immediately after, and had to find a camera angle that showed the crushed plane, but not any of the victims. Another was the day we watched in disbelief on the office TV as the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up after launch in 1986. We had no way in those days to get photos from outside Yukon except by mail, so we actually photographed the television screen and ran the picture across the front page.

Even crime in the Yukon could be international in scope. I remember the day a sharp-eyed Mountie in Watson Lake spotted an American who had been selling U.S. state secrets and was on the FBI’s most-wanted list.

The loss of the Whitehorse Star is more than the loss of another news voice. It has been part of the fabric of Yukon through most of its existence as a territory of Canada. So many newspapers, large and small, have disappeared recently. Little did we in the news business understand in the mid-1980s how the newly invented World Wide Web would fundamentally alter the economics of newspapers. Whitehorse is luckier than many other, larger Canadian cities that have lost their dailies in that it has other news voices, principally public and private broadcasters.

But the loss of the Star is also a loss to the training of young journalists. The traditional apprenticeship of working for acommunity paper before moving on the larger and wealthier newspapers has broken down. Today, what is left of community news operations are often online-only, getting along on government programs and unable to afford seasoned journalists at the helm to teach and guide the young journalists, who are left to figure things out alone. The remaining large papers are far smaller, shoestring operations.

The Star was part of this informal apprenticeship system, but sat at its pinnacle. Far from covering community events, birthdays and school board meetings, Star reporters were in what was essentially a provincial capital — learning to cover major issues, party politics, a provincial-style government, even the rigours of the Yukon Quest and, thus, getting a step ahead in their future career over most other young Canadian journalists. Many young Star reporters went on to careers in Canada’s top news operations.

— Massey Padgham is a news editor at the Vancouver Sun and Province newspapers. He has had supervisory roles at the Ottawa Citizen and Victoria Times Colonist, and has also worked at the Edmonton Journal, the Yellowknifer and the CBC.

By MASSEY PADGHAM