Joanasie Eegeesiak
Northern News Services

IQALUIT (July 12/99) - Iqaluit resident Paul Borkwood is an electronic news-gathering camera person for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.

Borkwood took a two-year television broadcasting course at the Loyalist College in Belleville, Ont., and has been a camera operator for the past five years. Before coming to Iqaluit, Borkwood was working for the CBC in Charlottetown P.E.I.

"I came to Iqaluit just for the job and now I've grown to love Iqaluit," he said.

He gets to travel around Nunavut about once every six to eight weeks and says he just loves it. He says the best place he's been to is Nuuk, Greenland, which he visited last year when CBC covered the Inuit Circumpolar Conference.

"That was really fun. It's like having Arctic Europe or something like that. It's so close, but it's so different. It's a European culture and mixed with a Inuit culture," said Borkwood.

"The busy part of the year is when the legislature's sitting, because we're doing legislature stories everyday and covering current affairs. It makes work busy everyday."

The most exciting stuff, news-wise, was when the CF-18 fighter jet crashed here in Iqaluit.

"It was pretty intense and it was fun," said Borkwood.

"The best part was when I went down to the floe edge for five days and got to film wildlife and do stories about hunting and meeting people out there. It was awesome," said Borkwood.

"Just the scenery: I never been camped out at the floe edge before and waking up right beside the ocean...it's right there. I was blown away. I saw polar bears and stuff like that. It was pretty nice."

The most difficult part of this job: "we're really a bureau for our production centre in Yellowknife and so we're so far away from our bosses and just having the two time zones difference...it is a big challenge for us working out at a bureau."

The part he doesn't like about the job the most is the logistics involved for them to get out to a place were a story is happening.

"If there's a story happening in, like, Pond Inlet or Grise Fiord, we just can't pick up there and fly in an instant."