Jorge Barrera
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Sep 26/01) - The city's mayor has been beating the drum hard on the national scene.

Over the past few months Gord Van Tighem has granted interviews to the Calgary Herald, Canadian Press, the Edmonton Sun, the Edmonton Journal, the Ottawa Citizen and even the Wall Street Journal.

Mayor Gord Van Tighem: The misconceptions are changing. - NNSL file photo

They're interested in diamonds, of course. But Van Tighem has his own mission: redefinition of his city's national profile.

A recent Ottawa Citizen article on Northern diamonds is typical. Its reporter used the mayor as the main spokesperson for the region, gushing, "Give Van Tighem 10 minutes and he'll change the way you think about diamonds."

In a recent interview with Canadian Press, however, Van Tighem described Yellowknife as "the only capital with road access which doesn't have a paved road in and out."

While the statement is nothing new for Yellowknifers, it might mean something else in other parts of the country, considering this city recently played host to the prime minister and the western caucus of the Liberal party.

If nothing else, says Van Tighem, it depicts the North's bottom-drawer placement on the national agenda.

But the first-term mayor is trying to change the image of a city that carries the weight of too many Gold Range bar myths and igloo-living, dogsled-driving stereotypes commonly found in the world view of Southerners.

To many unfamiliar with Yellowknife reality, it is still a Canadian Wild West border town, teetering on the edge of civilization, the outer rim of the world, a place where one can disappear.

That's the Yellowknife of Mordecai Richler's acclaimed novel, "Solomon Gursky Was Here," a home for a bush pilot who, "like so many free spirits or undischarged bankrupts, runaway husbands and other drifters, retreated to North of Sixty."

And the national media is not immune to donning those romantic glasses, seeing much of what happens in Yellowknife as quirky and weird, a real-life version of Stephen Leacock's fictional Ontario town of Mariposa.

This past spring the National Post ran a front-page story of the Caribou Carnival Queen "fiasco." According to the Post, the queen controversy "rocked the town."

That same weekend the Edmonton Journal mentioned Yellowknife's bulging drunk-tank during the carnival weekend.

This recycling of Northern mythology affects politicians as well. The next month, a Calgary city politician quipped that the Hell's Angels should move to the Northwest Territories or Siberia. Either one would do.

Van Tighem blasted the Calgary city councillor, saying it wasn't out of character for a Calgary politician to say something like that.

But the misconceptions are changing, said Van Tighem. Senior citizens are returning to Yellowknife to retire and people are staying longer, he said, noting that the average income might decrease with the end of the gold mine days.

Van Tighem said he believes the prosperity of Yellowknife affects the prosperity of the territory and vice versa. By trumpeting Yellowknife, he believes he is promoting the North.

So far Van Tighem's best opportunity to get Yellowknife on the national radar, out of the quirky front-page spot, next to the dog that can speak Chinese, came last month during the Liberal caucus meeting.

Van Tighem told the MPs that the federal government should invest more money into the territory's infrastructure, considering the amount of royalties Ottawa reaps from natural resource revenue here.

"What benefits the territory benefits the country," said Van Tighem in a separate interview.

With only 45 minutes left on the caucus meeting agenda, Van Tighem ended up using 75 minutes cramming in everything from the need for roads to the toxic liability -- 226,750 metric tonnes of arsenic trioxide -- buried beneath Giant mine.

Van Tighem said MPs in attendance got the message.

"They're usually bombarded with things from Quebec and Ontario but now they got to see how we live and listen to our issues," said the mayor, who is sending a summary of his notes and a letter to members of the Western caucus.

Now 10 months into his mandate, Van Tighem said he sees infinite possibilities for Yellowknife on the national stage.

Former city Mayor Dave Lovell used to characterize Yellowknife as a crossroads; Van Tighem calls this city a destination.

"Yellowknife to the South should be the land of opportunity, within reach and beyond belief," said Van Tighem, repeating once again, the city's new slogan.