Fonds F0221 - Gerard I. Kenney fonds

Gerard I. Kenney, BSc (1931-2014) was a telecommunications engineer and author who, beginning in mid-career, wrote about the wilderness and the history and the problems of the Canadian north. Born in St. Remi d'Amherst, Quebec, Gerry was brought up in New York City where he spent the first sixteen years of his life. He spent the summer months of every year at his grandparents' country inn in St. Remi which defined who Gerry became as an adult. His grandfather and six sons (Gerry’s uncles) introduced Gerry to the natural world to be experienced in the surrounding Laurentian mountains and lakes. Thoreau became his hero. Gerry built a small log cabin which still sits on the shores of a wind pond in the Little Nation Valley where he spent many happy hours. Graduating from McGill University in 1954 as a professional engineer, Gerry worked for 21 years with Bell Canada in Montreal and Quebec City and 18 years with the Canadian International Development Agency in what was then Hull, Quebec. After retiring from CIDA in 2002 Gerry devoted his time to his passion - writing. He published three books on the Arctic and one that recounted the highlights of his life journey and the building of a cabin on the Lake of the Old Uncles. He wrote numerous newspaper and magazine articles for publications including the Globe and Mail, Harrowsmith and Above and Beyond. He passed away in Ottawa on December 7, 2014.

Gerry’s engineering work for Bell Canada – in the NWT, Northern Quebec and Labrador – coupled with his love for "woodsy adventures", triggered his interest in helping to fix the communications problems of small, isolated communities. This interest led to his secondment to the Arctic Institute of North America in 1971 to work on a project called “Man in the North”. That project gave Gerry the opportunity to criss-cross Canada’s North to learn from northerners – especially native northerners – the kinds of communications systems that would help them to preserve and sustain and adapt their cultures in a time of great upheaval. In his report, he pointed out, first, that the government’s current plans for northern communications would have, "a devastating and quite probably irreversible impact on the people of the North". His solution to these problems was laid out in People Communications in Canada's North, Report of the Communications Task Force, Man in 'the North Project, Arctic Institute of North America, 2 vols. He then went on to write about how communications systems – including Canada’s much-anticipated “Anik” satellite – could be adapted to serve the needs of northerners suggesting such things as community and local programming using regional knowledge and the willingness and energies of northern people..
People Communications in Canada's North. Part II: The Solution, can be viewed here: http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED060986 http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED060986.pdf

His ideas have been accepted and adopted around the world. At CIDA he worked with colleagues Colin Billowes and the late Tony Zeitoun in the Telecom and High Tech Directorate. His work took him, with his family to Haiti in 1978 and he continued later in life to see how communications could be used to restore that country’s shattered fortunes. He worked in places like Zaire, Burkino Faso and Rwanda in Africa, assisting those countries to build telecommunications systems to thrive in today`s modern world. He also worked in Peru in South America after moving back to Ottawa in 1984.