SATURDAY NIGHT IN CANADA’S FAR NORTH

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 72, 18 December 1937, Page 22

SATURDAY NIGHT IN CANADA’S FAR NORTH

Personal Messages To The Outposts

To within 800 miles of the North Pole, at Craig Harbour, Ellesmere Island the world's most northerly police post, personal radio messages go winging each Saturday night as part of the service being given the remotest North Americans, who would . otherwise be cut off from the world. Radio listeners in the Canadian northland tune their radios each Saturday night to one of the 30 Canadian broadcasting stations, relaying messages from mothers, fathers, sisters, or brothers, to someone in the isolated north. Hundreds of messages come to Ottawa for transmission to the mounted police, fur traders, nuns, missionaries, doctors, prospectors, trappers, mining engineers, spending the winter far north of the railway in Canada’s Arctic and sub-Arctlc regions. Relatives and friends make Saturday night radio messages their contact through the winter months with the growing number of whites who live in the Far North. To some these messages are their only contact with relatives and friends outside till the next annual supply boat brings mail next summer. To Others the messages are supplementary to the weekly or monthly air mall service.

The Saturday night messages have grown from a small beginning in the early days of broadcasting when few sets were to be found in the Far North. Then American stations carried the service to North America’s most northern citizens. In recent years

Canadian stations have developed the service as the northland has grown in population, and from the few broadcasts have come the weekly hour-long services from November to May over a chain of stations. The messages have grown in numbers, so that last year over 6250 messages were broadcast. The messages come from all parts of the world. Many of the northerners hail from Great Britain, especially apprentice fur post clerks. Distant relatives avail themselves of the service of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a Government-operated radio service, to keep in touch with homey news with their isolated sons, nephews, friends. From all parts of the Dominion and many parts of the United States messages flock to Ottawa for transmission. Messages are brief and limited to three to each northerner on each transmission, and frequently batches of messages have to be carried over from one week to the next, so many come to Ottawa. Messages are not sent to points which have telegraph service, but only to those mining camps, fur posts, police stations, medical outposts, where radio is the only means of communication.

Reception is good in the Arctic. A recent cheek up in the eastern Arctic, the remotest area of all relying on annual supply ships, showed that out of some 900 messages more than half were perfectly received, and of the remainder only 14 had not been heard, with the rest imperfectly picked up.