Bernie MacNeil Made Technology Look Easy in a Place Where It Rarely Is

In the Western Arctic, “IT support” isn’t a help desk slogan. It’s whether a school can stay online, a business can keep its systems running, and a community can get the equipment it needs without waiting for the next shipment window. For more than three decades, Bernie MacNeil has built a business around that reality—quietly turning Arctic Digital Ltd. into one of Inuvik’s most dependable pieces of modern infrastructure.

An owner-operator model that lasts

MacNeil leads Arctic Digital as President and CEO, a structure that matters in the North because customers and institutions tend to value continuity over branding. Arctic Digital has been registered in the Beaufort Delta under the Government of the Northwest Territories’ Business Incentive Policy registry since July 1991, with MacNeil listed as the company’s President and CEO. 

In parallel, Arctic Digital is also listed as a registered Gwich’in business—an important signal in a procurement environment where local presence, long-term relationships, and community alignment are not marketing lines but operating requirements.

A storefront that doubles as a regional service hub

Arctic Digital runs as a practical, public-facing operation, with a physical presence on Mackenzie Road in Inuvik and regular store hours—part retail, part service counter, part troubleshooting station for residents and organizations alike. 

Its slogan—“Making Technology look easy since 1990!”—captures a deeper truth about the company’s role: when technology works in the North, it tends to be because someone on the ground did the planning, the sourcing, the setup, and the follow-through. 

The work behind the simple label “IT company”

Arctic Digital describes itself plainly: an IT company providing technical service and supplying IT equipment in the Northwest Territories, backed by “highly experienced and certified IT experts” and vendor partnerships. 

But the service list reads like a blueprint for how institutions actually stay operational in remote regions. The company offers disaster recovery planning and practice, network security design and implementation, and the planning, migration, support, and recovery of Microsoft infrastructure—Active Directory, Group Policy, Exchange, and Hyper-V among them. 

It’s the kind of portfolio that rarely draws attention when it’s done well—because its value shows up as the absence of crisis.

“Keeping the whole system running”

If there’s a single episode that illustrates Arctic Digital’s function, it was the period when demand for connectivity and equipment surged and the stakes of downtime rose sharply. In a 2020 interview, MacNeil described leaving government, starting the business in 1990, and spending decades providing IT support across the NWT—especially the Beaufort Delta—aimed at filling gaps in access and capacity.

In that same reporting, he framed the business in the language northern operators recognize: supply meeting demand, and a local team stepping up “to kind of keep the whole system running.” 

The northern advantage you can’t ship in

Arctic business stories often focus on megaprojects, commodity cycles, and government spending. MacNeil’s story is a different category: the patient building of local capability in the background layer of the economy.

Arctic Digital’s longevity—serving since 1990—signals more than survival. It suggests an operating discipline that can withstand the Arctic’s real constraints: distance, cost, weather, and the fact that when something breaks, “later” can be expensive. 

In a place like Inuvik, that’s what leadership looks like in practice: not a pitch deck, but a business that answers the phone, stocks what it can, sources what it can’t, and keeps critical systems working—year after year.