The Meech Lake Accord constitutional amendment proposal generated extensive debate throughout Canada and the Canadian north. Aboriginal and northern Canadians were particularly vocal in their opposition to the Accord. Northerners were especially offended by the ‘unanimity’ clause, which would have given every province a veto over the creation of new provinces in the north. This paper provides a brief history of the Yukon's constitutional status, and discusses options for future constitutional development, in the context of an impending Yukon Indian land claims settlement and the issues raised by the Meech Lake accord.

The first photographed observation of the harbour porpoise in Svalbard is reported. The harbour porpoise is not normally found in the high Arctic as it is a temperate and sub Arctic species, the nearest frequent location for the species being the north coast of Norway.

The ionosphere is a thick mantle of partly ionized gas surrounding the earth at heights between 80 and 800 km. It was discovered about fifty years ago, and during the last decade has been studied intensively at observatories all over the world. These studies consist primarily of observing the characteristics of radio waves reflected from the ionosphere. Since waves of different frequencies are reflected at different heights, it is possible to determine how the electron density varies with height, up to the height of maximum density at about 300 km. Radio waves which pass this height, however, continue into space and are not reflected. Consequently very little direct information can be obtained from the ground about the characteristics and behaviour of the ionized region above 300 km.

Explorer Joseph Elzéar Bernier's famous 1909 sector claim on Melville Island is often described as a key moment in the evolution of Canada's sovereignty over the Arctic archipelago. Writers such as Yolande Dorion-Robitaille and Marjolaine Saint-Pierre have argued that Bernier was unfairly deprived of the credit he deserved for his sovereignty contributions. Alan MacEachern has recently stated in Polar Record that civil servants in the 1920s were to blame for this supposed unfair treatment. In particular, he sees Oswald Finnie of the Department of the Interior as a man who was determined at all costs to rewrite the historical record. This article contests MacEachern's depiction of Finnie and his colleagues, based on a range of primary source documents. It also emphasises the little-known but very significant role played by James White, who first placed the sector lines on an official map five years before Bernier's 1909 proclamation. The article thus clarifies the complicated relationship between White's 1904 map, Bernier's 1909 claim, an earlier sector claim made by Bernier in 1907, and the views on the sector theory held by influential members of the Canadian civil service at the time when an official sector claim was made by Ottawa in 1925.