A Northern moment: Minister Vandal visits SmartICE's Northern Production Centre (video)

Transcript

Text on screen: A Northern moment. SmartICE Northern Production Centre in Inuit Nunangat.

SmartICE opened its Northern Production Centre in Nain in May 2019. The centre trains and employs youth to manufacture its SmartBuoy technology, which is designed to measure ice thickness and keep people safe.

Dr. Trevor Bell, Founding Director, SmartICE: We're going to focus this afternoon on Nain, and I'm really happy as founding director. One of the main goals of winning the Arctic Inspiration Prize in 2017 was to establish the Northern Production Centre in Nain, so I'm really happy that we're able to introduce that to you today.

Rex Holwell, Northern Production and Regional Operations Lead, SmartICE: I'm here in my role as the Northern Production Lead at the Northern Production Centre in Nain, and here we have a couple of my youths who participated in our youth cohort the best.

Christian Obed, Production Intern, SmartICE: Hi, my name is Christian. I'm a youth at SmartICE. I am from Nain Labrador.

Renee Semigak, Former Production Intern, SmartICE: Hi, I'm Renee. I'm from Nain.

Rex Holwell, Northern Production and Regional Operations Lead, SmartICE: So, Christian was part of this cohort, the third cohort and Renee was part of the second cohort that we held actually a year from this time.

Carolann Harding, Executive Director, SmartICE: So, Rex is going to take us on a quick tour of the space and he's going to focus in a little bit about the buoy.

So, he's going to take his cell phone now and pan the room, scan over to the buoys and we've got a training buoy there and we've got some component pieces of how the technology works, so how the science works and how we took the science and made it into a working piece of equipment.

So, we share a building with many other tenants, probably 4 or 5 other tenants and we have an office space which is great and a shared kitchen and then we have the main floor down here that we've really made into a nice, bright, safe space.

One of our philosophies is to make sure with socio-emotional learning and well-being that we have a safe space for everybody to feel comfortable in and work in. So, here is our space, a lot of things come out of this space. It's small but it's pretty powerful.

Christian Obed, Production Intern, SmartICE: You grab your thermistor. Once you got your thermistor, you grab your o-ring and you put it on your thermistor.

Then, once you put the wave washer on your thermistor, you grab your 2 o-rings, put it on your thermistor.

Once you've got that done, you grab your nut plate and put it on the back of the motherboard and you screw your thermistor into the motherboard and once that is done, you hook your wires into your motherboard.

And once your got all of your thermistors into your motherboard, you put your motherboard into your module, like this.

And once that's done, you grab your 2 o-rings and put it into the grooves, like this. Two of them.

And once that's done, you put your lid on top of your module.

Rex Holwell, Northern Production and Regional Operations Lead, SmartICE: So, here we have the SmartBuoy.

So, this is the actual SmartBuoy that we have in Nain. So, what you can see, it's very long, it's 9 feet long.

So, this one was made in Nain last year with my cohort last year. So, what you see – it's made out of 4 modules, so, as in Christian's video, they'll put modules with the motherboards and thermistors into it. And we do the pressure testing, we do computer testing to make sure they work before we send them out.

So, here you see Nain SmartBuoy. It has 4 modules: 1, 2, 3, 4. And it has 15 thermistors in each module. So, essentially it's one long thermometer but what each of these individual thermistors do, is they measure temperature.

So here. On each side you see the floats. So, when we deploy it in the ice it actually floats. If we were to throw it in water, it will float.

So, when we go out to deploy it, we'll cut a hole in the ice and we'll just lower it into the ice. And, ideally from this section down, this would be in the water.

So, this section here would be measuring the ice temperature and whatever snow. The snow will be whatever depth it is and the rest of the thermistors will be measured at this area.

So, the section that we're worried about, that we're concerned about is this section here in the ice.

So, from this section here, down, is in the water. So, let's say the ice is this thick when we first deploy it. And, we can tell how thick the ice is by the temperature difference in the thermistors. As the ice freezes and gets deeper it'll change the temperature reading on the thermistor and that's how we can tell the difference of the ice thickness.

So, vice-versa in the spring, when it melts from underneath, the water will rise up. It will melt. And we can tell how thin the ice is getting by the temperature difference in the thermistors, in this area here.

So, at the end of it, it's run by 16 D batteries and it does last the whole ice season. You can see here my youth have just finished building; this is one battery pack, so they actually have to build it. So, it sits in the water and it does last a whole ice season. So, that's 16 D batteries.

And, at the top of it sticking out of the ice is the antenna head and here you can see an antenna head the youth have built. So, inside of this is a GPS and an antenna that sends out the signal. So, once a day it'll take a reading and it'll transmit the data, where it will be interpreted by somebody so we can tell how thick the ice is and how deep the snow is and the current air temperature.

And that's how a SmartBuoy works.

Dr. Trevor Bell, Founding Director, SmartICE: I'd like to stress, Minister, that there were many, many people who said that this could not work, that you couldn't establish a technology production center in the North and that you cannot train Inuit youth to do this type of technical assembly.

And, so we are proving them all wrong and in a sense we're breaking that glass ceiling that nobody can ever say again that that cannot, that this sort of technology cannot be assembled in the north by Inuit youth.

Hon. Dan Vandal, Minister of Northern Affairs: Yes, that is wonderful.

Carolann Harding, Executive Director, SmartICE: Renee, can you share some things that you learned that you still use every day?

Renee Semigak, Former Production Intern, SmartICE: Well, we learned square breathing while I was doing workshops here and I tend to use that a lot at home actually.

Carolann Harding, Executive Director, SmartICE: Excellent. So, we do have a component of social, emotional and well-being within our program. So, we look at the entire package, it's just not how to make, how to make the buoy.

So, there's multiple exercises, financial literacy, making a resume, goal setting, all kinds of really interesting things in this entire package of employment readiness. So, each one of the youth usually walk out with several different types of skills.

So, Renee uses the square breathing every day and it's a really good way of grounding yourself for the day, hey Renee?

Renee Semigak, Former Production Intern, SmartICE: Yes.

Hon. Dan Vandal, Minister of Northern Affairs: That's excellent, Renee, because that's something that I learned to do many years ago and I still do it today actually to, when you're feeling anxious to just breathe through your stomach and it's something you can keep with you for life.

I want to thank everyone who took part in this wonderful presentation. It's very, very interesting and glad I was a part of it.

I want to thank Christian and Renee for the great work you're doing. Please keep working hard and you'll do great things.

So, I think it's wonderful that it combines so many important elements of the North, Indigenous Knowledge, science, climate change and I'm glad I was a part of this and I look forward to working together more in the future.

Carolann Harding, Executive Director, SmartICE: Thank you. Stay safe everyone.

Text on screen: Photos and supplemental video courtesy of SmartICE.

Text on screen: Canada wordmark