CHURCHILL, Manitoba (AP) — Change has broken, reshaped and continues to reshape this remote town where tundra meets forest on the shore of Hudson Bay.
The economic base collapsed as the army left the city. Railroads and freight ships—the lifeblood of supplies for a city with no road links to the rest of the world—failed. The weather warmed, the wildlife dwindled, and even the ground shifted.
Churchill has adapted through it all. The city has focused on tourism, luring people eager to see the many polar bears. Leaders have figured out ways to revitalize the harbor and the rail network. With climate change at play, they have begun to design more adaptable buildings and are trying to attract a more diverse range of visitors if, as scientists fear, shrinking sea ice could cause the bear population to plummet.
Residents, government officials and experts say the city is a model for dealing with drastic change, and they attribute this to the rural mentality, which focuses on solutions rather than whining.
Churchill is about 1,700 kilometres (1,055 miles) north of Winnipeg. The city had thousands of residents before the military base and a missile launch site closed decades ago. Those sites fell into disrepair, and what was once a busy port closed. Rail service stopped for more than a year as weather destroyed poorly maintained tracks.
As the city shrank, bears began to flock to the city. They were no longer deterred by the noise of the base and rocket launches. They were also growing desperate as climate change was shrinking the ice in Hudson Bay, which they rely on as a hunting base.
A local mechanic built a souped-up recreational vehicle to safely view the bears. Photographs and documentaries drew tourists, who spent an average of $5,000 per visit and millions of dollars in total. Churchill now calls itself the polar bear capital of the world, and while there are no traffic lights, there are fancy restaurants and many small hotels.
If that happens, Churchill hopes to be ready.
The city promotes beluga whale tourism, even though they too could be harmed by the shift in the entire Hudson Bay ecosystem, including the food the belugas eat, to one normally seen farther south. It also highlights the prospects for visitors to see the Northern Lights, spot birds they can’t see at home, and even try dog sledding.
“Eventually you’re going to lose bear season. And we know that. Either way, it’s just a matter of adapting to that change,” said Mike Spence, mayor since 1995. “You can’t dwell on it. It’s not going to win you any points.”
Spence grew up on the military installation, “and then all of a sudden it closes and all of a sudden you get the tourists, the abundance of wildlife, the aurora borealis. You take advantage of that. You change things around and you make life better.”
The closed port and the damaged railroad tracks? The city took them over and got them both working again. The ground is sinking as the weather gets rainier and the permafrost thaws? New buildings like those of Polar Bears International, a conservation nonprofit headquartered in the city, have metal jacks that can be adjusted if a corner sinks nearly half a foot in five years.
According to Lauren Sorkin, executive director of the Resilient Cities Network, every city should have a plan to adapt to the impacts of climate change on its economy and tourism.
“Churchill is a prime example of a city thinking ahead to protect communities and conserve our natural environment and biodiversity,” she said.
Spence, who is Cree, grew up without electricity or running water in “the flats” on the edge of the city, which was run by a white minority. Churchill is about two-thirds indigenous, with Cree, Metis, Inuit and Dene. Spence remembers his father telling him that if he could speak better English, he could tell the officials how to improve the city.
“I think I do that for him,” Spence said. “You don’t just say, ‘I have a problem.’ You go in with the solution.”
You can’t drive to Churchill. Food, people, freight, everything comes by train, boat or plane. The train is the cheapest and most locals take the night train to Thompson and then head south.
Until a few years ago, the tracks, which were leased to a private company, were not well maintained, and the wet, stormy spring of 2017 washed out 22 tracks between Churchill and points south, Spence said. The company couldn’t afford to repair them.
According to Angie Pendergrass, a climate scientist at Cornell University, major storms in Churchill are causing as much as 30 percent more rain than 80 years ago because of human-caused climate change.
“The service was down for 18 months,” Spence said. “It was just devastating.”
Meanwhile, not enough goods were coming into the aging port. Spence said the shipping hub and rail lines needed to function as an integrated system, not be run by an absentee American owner, so the city negotiated with the federal and state governments for local control and federal financial assistance.
In 2018, Arctic Gateway Group, a partnership of 41 First Nations and northern communities, took over ownership of the port and the rail line. Rail service returned on Halloween that year. Manitoba officials said 610 kilometres of track have been upgraded and 10 bridges repaired in the past two years. Shipping at the port has more than tripled since 2021, including the return of the first cruise ship in a decade, they said.
Earlier this year, officials announced an additional $60 million in port and rail funding would be released.
Local ownership is key in Churchill, said former Chamber of Commerce president Dave Daley, who left the city in the 1980s but returned after five years because he and his wife missed it. Big hotel chains came along once and said they could fix the city’s infrastructure and build something big.
“We all stood up and said ‘no,'” Daley said. “We’re a tight-knit group. We have our different opinions and everything, but we know what we want Churchill to be.”
As Churchill evolves, its forgotten past sometimes surfaces when tourists ask about its residents and their history, says Georgina Berg, a longtime resident of the flats who, like Spence, lived there as a child. That past includes “not so happy stories” of forced removals, missing women, poverty, self-sufficiency, neglect, deaths and abuse, says Berg, who is Cree.
Daley, a dog sled racer and president of Indigenous Tourism Manitoba, tells how the Métis people were ignored, abused and punished. But he ends the history lesson with an abrupt twist.
“We can’t change what happened five minutes ago, but we can change what happened five minutes from now,” Daley said. “So that’s what I teach my kids. You know it’s nice to know the history and all the atrocities and everything that happened, but if we’re going to be better about it, we’ve got to look forward and see what we can do five minutes from now to change that.”
Meanwhile, Daley and Spence are noticing changes in the weather — not just warmer, but they’re getting thunderstorms here, something that was once unthinkable. The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the world. While Churchill isn’t doing so badly because it’s south of the Arctic Circle, “it’s something we’re taking seriously,” Spence said.
“It’s a matter of finding the right mix in how you adapt to climate change,” Spence said. “And working with it.”
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