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The roar of jet engines over a sea of happy Yellowknifers, an armada of affluent tourists flying planes to our city - it's clear by the number of people who attended the Yellowknife air show and those who visited in their own planes with the Century Flight Club earlier this month, that our city is still much ado about airplanes.

Aircraft remain, as they were in 1930s and '40s, a major lifeline to the south.

The Yellowknife Airport ranked 32nd in the number of aircraft movements among airports nationally, according to Statistics Canada, with 53,463 flights landing and taking off in 2010. That's a fair-sized number for a city of fewer than 20,000 people.

In the midst of all this hustle and bustle in the skies above us is the ongoing saga at city hall concerning the municipality's desire to install a 12-metre dock bought and paid for with a $50,000 tourism grant from the Department of Industry, Tourism and Investment. The dock, recommended by the Yellowknife Harbour Commission to extend from a small park at the end of Lessard Drive on Latham Island, is supposed to accommodate visiting floatplane fliers and small boats.

The city had hoped to install the dock this summer but has faced fierce opposition from nearby residents. The expressed fear is that a sudden influx of floatplanes will disrupt the neighbourhood and cause safety concerns, but Latham Island residents have always been suspicious of incursions by the city.

Those suspicions date back 12 years to the failed Waterfront Plan that called for public trails along the Latham Island shore that would have crossed over privately-built docks on public land.

The city hasn't helped itself by its seemingly high-handed approach to the matter. Residents complained about a lack of consultation from by the city, and were riled by administration's decision to purchase the dock before receiving approval from city council. Word that senior administrative officer Bob Long was parking his floatplane for free on city-leased land on Wiley Road was cause for even more ruffled feathers.

Hal Logsdon, president of the NWT Float Plane Association, proposed to put the dock there, to the approval of Latham residents, but administration rejected that idea, citing further opposition from the adjacent Great Slave Yacht Club and a family nearby.

Surrounded by opposition, city council deferred a decision yet again on where to put the dock Monday.

We sympathize but for better or worse, we have the dock now and it ought to go somewhere on the water rather than be mothballed in a garage somewhere. City councillor David Wind surmised that the dock will become quickly populated by planes belonging to affluent residents. We hope not because it is quite obvious there is an appetite among out-of-town plane owners to visit Yellowknife and spend money. The Yellowknife Air Show and Century Club injected $1.75 million into the local economy with their presence earlier this month. No doubt last year's Floatplane Fly-in and an unrelated visit by 20 fliers two weeks later also gave our city's economy a boost.

It doesn't look like the dock will get installed this year. Hopefully it will be ready for next year's Floatplane Fly-in - somewhere on Back Bay. It would be a shame if this city council simply decides to play out the clock and leave the mess for the next council to sort out following the election this fall.

Mackenzie Days has come a long way.

A few years ago the annual summer event was synonymous with out-of-control, alcohol-fuelled parties.

The parties weren't supported by the organizers of Mackenzie Days, but they happened anyway during the same long weekend in Fort Providence.

Even the popular spelling of the name of the event at the time, Mackenzie Daze, added to the suggestion of over indulgence.

The members of the Mackenzie Days Committee have worked hard to turn the annual event's image around.

For a number of years, a lot of effort has gone into promoting Mackenzie Days as a family-oriented event.

An additional step this summer, with the decision to separate the adult-focused events, especially those involving alcohol, to a different weekend is following with that intent.

The adult dance, bingo and talent show are taking place between July 27 and 29 while the rest of the events will run from Aug. 3 to 5.

It's a great idea.

By moving those three events to an earlier weekend, the committee is ensuring the long weekend can be devoted to families, and that is what Mackenzie Days is all about.

Adults will still be able to go to the dance and drink if they so choose, but that drinking won't affect the majority of the other events.

The Mackenzie Days Committee is also moving in the right direction in another area.

This year, the committee held a series of community meetings to see if there was still interest in Fort Providence for Mackenzie Days. The meetings were designed to get more residents involved in the planning and organizing stages of the events.

As a result, instead of four or five committee members doing the bulk of the ground work, there will be approximately 20 people involved from the beginning. An added bonus of the additional community buy-in will be an increased sense of community pride and ownership in the event.

Mackenzie Days has been celebrated in Fort Providence for decades. The changes being made this year should ensure the popular long-weekend event continues to delight even more generations.

All Fort Providence residents and people in the surrounding communities should remember to come out and support Mackenzie Days.

The 24th annual Great Northern Arts Festival has come and gone.

With it came and went artists, tourists, volunteers, teachers and friends.

Inuvik, and the rest of the North, has a vibrant arts community, filled with talented artists of all kinds. Spinners, carvers, painters, sewers, knitters and storytellers, to name a few, are everywhere.

Unfortunately, it can be a struggle to showcase and share these talents with visitors and with Northerners.

Walking through the gallery at the Midnight Sun Recreation Complex during the festival was overwhelming. So much talent and tradition was on display.

But the true art wasn't the finished pieces with prices clearly marked and attached.

The true talent was in the workshop spaces.

For the duration of the festival, participants could make anything. A basket made of goose feet, sealskin mittens, felted fish, yarn, kamiiks, dream catchers, drums, tie-dyed shirts and fabric – the list could go on indefinitely.

Whether you signed up for a workshop or not, you could stroll through and watch people at work.

That was the amazing part. The shared knowledge transformed a room of artists, residents and tourists into a close-knit community.

It was a place to get a taste of traditional or contemporary culture. One moment you could be scraping hide while in the next you were pouring thickened acrylic paint onto surfaces so it could dry before being peeled off and turned into three-dimensional objects.

That is exactly what's missing from the everyday.

There are so many skills passed down from generation to generation, but with an onslaught of technology it's easy to forget about the simple pleasures of sitting down and sharing knowledge with someone.

The workshops were a place where language didn't matter, so much could be shown with a hand gesture or the simple shake of the head.

It wasn't only tourists who signed up for workshops. Charissa Alain-Lilly led two workshops, but still found time to join Kate Inuktalik's kamiiks workshop.

Watching Inuktalik quickly trim caribou legs, Alain-Lilly remarked on how rare this knowledge was becoming.

"This is almost a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity," she said.

"There aren't any written patterns and fewer and fewer people know how to do this."

It's time to start preserving these skills. People don't live forever, but they can leave what they've learned for others.

Hopefully, that true picture doesn't include a return of the alley of filth behind 50 Street - a daily reality a few years ago when our city's homeless didn't have a place to use the washroom during business hours.

There is much at stake for the city now that the shelter is closed to give its staff a much needed vacation, but since city hall doesn't have the mandate or the human resources to manage the social ills afflicting our downtown core it falls on the territorial government to make sure the shelter doesn't simply fade out of existence.

The GNWT has been decidedly non-decisive when it comes to future funding to keep the doors open. Beyond $125,000 for one more year - about half the money needed to keep the shelter open - Health and Social Services Minister Tom Beaulieu won't commit to permanent funding. Meanwhile, Yellowknife Centre MLA Robert Hawkins, whose riding includes the facility, insists he is in favour of keeping the shelter open. However, Hawkins has continuously questioned its policies and services, complaining about public drunkenness and sex acts taking place outside.

The GNWT brain trust must get it through their heads that the day shelter isn't just a downtown Yellowknife facility. It and other struggling non-profit agencies like it, such as the Centre for Northern Families, provide a service territorially.

For all those people from communities across the NWT who are spat out by the justice system onto our city's streets and are unwelcome back home, the Yellowknife day shelter is crucial to their well-being. And, no doubt, it absorbs at least some of the hassles faced by merchants and commuters downtown. Anyone who has been living and working within the city core the last couple years since the shelter opened is surely aware of this.

Yes, having a day shelter is not without headaches but the alternative is much worse. It is crucial then that the GNWT doesn't let the facility die due to a lack of willingness to see the big picture.

Public freedom can be compromised when courts curtail freedom of the press.

This is why Yellowknifer vigorously disagrees with last week's ruling by the NWT territorial court that limits accredited journalists' use of electronic devices in NWT courts.

Accredited media and justice professionals are now permitted to use electronic devices, such as computers, tablets and mobile phones, in territorial court, provided all transmission functions are disabled. Audio and video recordings and photographs are still prohibited.

In effect, all the NWT ruling does is replace pen and paper with a keyboard.

Court technology policies vary across Canada. In Nunavut, a draft policy, if enacted, would permit Internet transmissions and audio recordings in that territory's courts.

Residents of the NWT deserve the same timely window into legal proceedings.

The modern Western justice system stems from the Roman Republic, which shared information with Roman citizens on publicly-displayed ivory tablets more than 2,500 years ago. Transparency of the justice system should change with the times, and that means allowing immediate communications from electronic recording devices so more people can follow what's happening in our courts.

With only one seat in the House of Commons and no political will to make meaningful investments in the North, it will be a long time before the territory gets what its people need.

While Nunavummiut wait for adequate housing, drug and alcohol addictions treatment infrastructure, more medical staff and more jobs, the federal government spent $70,000 on an F-35 photo op, $1 million on Prince William and Catherine Middleton's cross-Canada tour, and are spending $28 million on the War of 1812 bicentennial this year.

As part of the $1.2-billion bill the feds picked up for the G20 summit in Toronto in 2010, the government spent $14,000 on glow sticks, $85,000 for snacks, $14,300 for bug jackets, $26,000 for mosquito traps, $334,000 for kits that included sunscreen, insect repellent and hand sanitizer, and more than $60,000 for binoculars.

This sort of frivolous spending, of which the above examples are just the tip of the iceberg, is not new - the Liberals were hardly any better.

The trouble is, the North is just an afterthought to southerners, and Nunavut, with one seat in the House of Commons, has an almost non-existent impact on the politics of the country.

Nunavut MP Leona Aglukkaq has occupied an integral role in the Tory cabinet as health minister, but since taking office has been more a Conservative MP than Nunavut MP, and toes the party line unwaveringly - having a player on the winning team hasn't made as huge a difference for Nunavut as some may have hoped.

The biggest pieces of the federal money pie continue to go toward the constituencies with the most votes, and toward the country's political and economic posturing in the global scene. The sparsely populated North continues to get quick-fixes and the occasional investment and photo op so it doesn't feel completely ignored.

Nunavut is part of Canada and the government wants to keep it that way, as it is home to much mineral and off-shore potential - this potential is what is at stake in maintaining Arctic sovereignty.

Lost in all this are its people, trying to build an economy as a non-devolved jurisdiction without any roads connecting its communities to the south or even each other; a jurisdiction whose main industry is government, followed by mining, with the fledgling fisheries and arts-and-crafts industries trying to build steam.

With high costs of air travel, the potential of tourism being any sort of major economic force in the territory is low.

Due to lack of industry, tax base and the absence of province-like perks and powers, the territorial budget relies mostly on federal transfer payments, and it's been scraping by on what it's received. But will the territory have to wait until devolution is settled and industries are slowly built up in order for it to have the housing infrastructure it needs, the public infrastructure - such as ports so communities can develop fisheries - to create jobs for Nunavummiut, and the communications infrastructure it needs so Nunavut businesses can flourish in a similar environment to those down south?

The North needs major investments so it can start carving out its place in Canada's economy, and I hope one day a government will come along and prove the cynic in me wrong by prioritizing its people over extravagant celebrations and ceremonies.

It has been a tragic month in the NWT on the water. One confirmed drowning, another missing and presumed drowned and seven more lucky to be alive. In 2011, the NWT recorded its first year with zero water-related deaths, a statistic that raised hope people's habits on the water have changed for the better.

Although we do not yet know what caused Nicole Horassi to drown in the Mackenzie River, the other two cases do point to unsafe water practices. Both Tony Rabesca and a group of seven from Inuvik left their communities with no means of communication in case of trouble.

More concerning, three of the seven from Inuvik did not inform anyone they were leaving town and none of them told anyone their travel plans, meaning searchers had no idea where to start looking.

Travelling on the water - or the ice in the winter -- in the territory isn't just a recreational activity, it's a necessity.

In a land where travel on rivers and lakes is so vital, water safety should be commonplace. Perhaps it is just that familiarity that breeds unsafe practices.

From 2002 to 2011, according to the NWT chief coroner's annual reports, there were 48 drowning deaths in the NWT, the worst year being 2006 when 11 people drowned.

Wearing a life jacket, avoiding the use of drugs and alcohol while boating or swimming, filing travel plans with friends or the RCMP, and carrying affordable SPOT locator devices, will not only save lives, but money as well. Every time someone goes missing thousands - if not tens of thousands - of dollars are spent on the search effort, especially when rescuers have no idea where to begin looking.

In the case of Horassi, residents from Tulita and beyond pulled together to provide food, money and assistance in the search effort. Although the outcome was a tragic and a terrible loss for the family and community, the level of support offered was nothing short of remarkable and shows how far people of the NWT will go to help their own.

Let's work to avoid further loss of life and repeat years such as 2011. For the most part, deaths on the ice and water can be avoided with a few simple precautions. No matter how experienced you might be, it doesn't hurt to exercise caution, not only for your sake but also for your family and community.

The Canadian Rangers are the eyes and ears of our military in the remotest parts of the country.

They guide our troops while training in the harsh Arctic environment and act as role models in their communities.

An extension of that legacy is the Junior Canadian Rangers, an invaluable outlet for youth who might not be into sports or arts.

Aside from being part of a proud tradition that dates back to just after the Second World War, the Junior Rangers teach our youth discipline, and a myriad of on-the-land skills while providing them with a strong sense of community and self that hopefully turns them away from drugs and alcohol.

With decades of history, the Rangers have also become a generational organization binding families to a common purpose. People such as Aklavik's Ella Archie, her husband Peter and their two children have made the Rangers a family affair.

The binding nature of the Rangers not only fosters positive behaviour among individuals but links families in a healthy and nurturing environment.

For these reasons, join us in a salute to the Canadian Rangers.

There is no end in sight for the territory's land use plan until the people involved decide to communicate properly and develop stronger working relationships.

For years, the federal government, the Government of Nunavut, Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., and the Nunavut Planning Commission have been working toward a regulatory system to determine how land outside communities will be used and what land will be protected.

In 2007, the project shifted from regional planning to a Nunavut-wide plan. There have been at least four versions of the draft plan developed between June 2010 and this past March.

An independent review of the Draft Nunavut Land Use Plan presented earlier this month found that the water is murky when it comes to the roles and responsibilities of each body involved and that their relationship overall is quite fragile. The review authors offered 20 recommendations to fix the problems.

The review also noted "mistrust and a lack of mutual respect" between the parties.

For the sake of Nunavummiut and the protection and development of their land, the governing bodies need to align their expectations, listen to what's being brought to the table and fully engage the public and stakeholders.

The longer the issues stew, the more time the development process will drag on and the more resources will be wasted on reviews. There is a real risk that industry will grow frustrated as well, pack up and go elsewhere.

To prevent that, there must be a clear vision of what the Draft Nunavut Land Use Plan should do and steps taken to ensure it is put in place sooner rather than later.

This year marks the first that the organization Outward Bound has been a presence in the territory since its dog-sledding adventures in the 1990s.

Last week, a plane dropped a group of youth from Kimmirut and Iqaluit off at Mount Joy where they were to paddle the Soper River. Let's hope there are future treks to follow in its path.

A journey like this is a remarkable opportunity. The youth have a chance to challenge themselves physically, culturally and emotionally in a new and exciting environment with their peers. They learn new skills, make new relationships and come out of the program stronger than before.

The interest seems strong from the participants, the organizers and the sponsors.

Hopefully, resources and enthusiasm continue so a fresh group of Nunavut youth can dive into an educational experience like this one, allowing them to gain knowledge of the land, work with a team and push their limits.

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