Survival in the Arctic tundra requires a certain wherewithal — a variety of aptitudes that differ slightly, one might assume, from what one needs to know to live in, say, a blazing hot desert. Increasingly however, it seems to be that whether one’s walk of life leaves tracks in sand or snow, it’s all in the same stride.
Take for example the barren, wind-blasted coast of the northern tip of Newfoundland where tiny pockets of communities cling to existence. In this region of “The Rock” — as Newfoundlanders wistfully refer to this island off Canada’s east coast — people are not so much the salt of earth as the salt of the sea. Historically, growing up here meant being in a boat with one’s father learning the jigs and reels of fishing cod from the frigid North Atlantic.
Today’s lessons
In the later half of the 20th century, however, fleets of industrialized factory freezer vessels arrived from around the world to pillage the bountiful Grand Banks, dragging nets the size of city blocks across the ocean floor and hauling up cod by the ton with every pass. Today, the fish stocks are decimated beyond commercial viability and the ageing fishermen of these outport settlements are undoubtedly among the last of their kind.
With no future for them at work on the waves, the children of these fishermen are left to learn a new livelihood, a fact that has led may of them to the classrooms of the College of the North Atlantic (CNA) in St. Anthony which, with close to 3,000 residents, is by far the region’s largest town and claims the only traffic light for the next 450 km.
Here, some 100 full-time students pursue college diplomas and trade certificates in fields ranging from health sciences to information technology and business studies to industrial trades. Indeed, the CNA has been a public institution in Newfoundland and Labrador — the province’s official name — for more than 40 years, with 16 other campuses similar to the one in St. Anthony spread through the vast southern expanses of the island, offering training and opening career opportunities for the some 8,500 full-time students who attend. The CNA is often the only locally available institution for post-secondary education, and the role it plays on The Rock today — offering students new skill-sets necessary to adapt to rapid economic change — has resonated in places that couldn’t be farther removed.
Just under a decade ago, in the torrid heat and dust storms of the Middle Eastern state of Qatar, a problem began vexing Her Highness Sheikha Moza Bint Nasser al-Misnad and other members of Qatar’s royal family: despite an economy surging on oil revenues and a GDP per capita amongst the highest in the world, few Qataris were actually engaged in an active role in their nation’s development — they simply did not have the training to be able to do so, and thus most of the skilled technical work was being done by expatriates.
The education quest
To remedy this situation and encourage greater Qatari participation in national industries like oil and gas, it was decided a “college of technology” ought to be founded in the emirate under the guidance of a foreign partner institution. Deeming the Canadian education model most attractive, the Canadian Bureau of International Education (CBIE) was contacted, which then accepted submission proposals from colleges across Canada and short-listed four for the Qataris’ inspection.
And so on May 2, 2001, some 14 arduous hours drive south of St. Anthony, a plane carrying a delegation of senior advisers to Her Highness landed at the airport outside Newfoundland’s capital St. John’s. The Rock was still frozen in winter’s grip as the royal family’s emissaries stepped from their chauffeured limos at the provincial legislature building, greeted by a massive Qatari flag rippling in the wind above a flagpole half buried in a gargantuan snow bank.
“I think they saw a little of themselves in us,” said Stephen Lee, CNA’s marketing and communications manager, floating the idea of cultural similarities derived from Qatar’s pearl diving past and Newfoundland’s fishing heritage, also noting that Qatar’s oil-fuelled economic revolution is what Newfoundland dreams will come of its own relatively-infantile-but-expanding oil industry. “Really, we’re following in their footsteps,” he claimed.
However dubious this might sound, money talks, and soon after the 2001 visit the two parties signed a 10-year, $500 million contract for the creation of the somewhat-oddly-named “College of the North Atlantic – Qatar.”
In the seven years since the agreement — the largest deal ever for any Canadian university — CNA-Q has grown to be the second largest educational institution in the emirate, worth some $1.7 billion, with 600 employees, 2,500 students, a 75,000 square meter campus with state-of-the-art industrial workshops, laboratories, computer systems, libraries, lounges, swimming pools and cafés.
In June 2008 Newfoundland’s premier Danny Williams, on his first trip to Qatar to attend graduation ceremonies at the CNA-Q, remarked, “It really was an unbelievable ceremony. This young girl gets up, the valedictorian, and speaks so eloquently without notes… and the energy minister turns to me and says, ‘we owe all of this to Newfoundland and Labrador’.”
And with that a most unlikely of fraternities was affirmed, bonding The Pearl of the Persian Gulf to The Rock of the North Atlantic, with the educational essentials of living in the modern age building the bridge over the oceans between.
