One of the first Canadian TV series to bring up the topic of residential schools. Residential schools for indigenous Canadian children, often religious schools in nature, existed well into the mid 1990's, and were often breeding grounds for abuse and cultural erasure. On June 11th, 2008, Canada's Prime Minister, the Right Honourable Stephen Harper, publicly apologized to Canada's Indigenous Peoples for the IRS system, admitting that residential schools were part of a Canadian policy on forced Indigenous assimilation.
Lynx River is a fictional Northwest Territories community. North of 60 was actually filmed in Alberta mostly, which is more to the south, although the concept of Lynx River and its isolation was based on various real-life Canadian villages and small towns in the Northwest Territories.
North of 60 was one of the first Canadian TV shows to talk about the HIV/AIDS crisis, and the prejudice at the time, the other show being Degrassi High (a spin-off of Degrassi Junior High). North of 60 was praised for its portrayal of Nevada, a male prostitute who had contracted HIV/AIDS after having gotten involved with prostitution as a runaway minor, and the show raised awareness of an arising problem in Canada during the 1990's, that of First Nations youth getting involved with prostitution and sex trafficking to survive in big cities like Vancouver. The show also addressed anti-gay prejudices and anti-Indigenous prejudices connected with HIV/AIDS.
The characters Eric Olsen and Hannah Kenidi were written off in the show as having died not merely as a plot device, contrary to popular belief, but as a way to remedy the absence of both of these actors on the series. Gerry Bean, who played Eric Olsen under the stage name "John Oliver", had been fired from North of 60 due to his relationship with co-actress Tina Keeper causing on-air friction. Selina Hanuse, who played Hannah Kenidi, made occasional, very brief reappearances on North of 60 as the ghost of Hannah, but left the show to go to school, hence why her character was written off as being killed in a bridge accident. Tragically, Hanuse died in a car accident in 2000, at the age of 17, just shy of her last year of high school, near Nanaimo Station in Vancouver. As of 2005, there was still a memorial cross near the Sky Train Station where Selina died. Her picture was eventually taken down after being there for many years. As a result, Hanuse did not appear as any form of Hannah Kenidi in any of the North of 60 spin-off films, although she had landed an acting role in the 1993 Vancouver-set TV movie Liar, Liar: Between Father and Daughter as the classmate of a girl accusing her father of incest. Aside from North of 60, this was Hanuse's only other acting role; she had planned to finish high school and leave acting in the late 1990's.
North of 60 was praised in the 1990's for pointing out various untrue stereotypes of Canada as a country, as well as Canada's First Nations people. Examples include the exclusion of the red Mountie (RCMP) uniform, which is typically only used in formal ceremony, dialogue on how Canada's politics and government work (Canada is not socialist or communist, contrary to popular belief, and its Indigenous groups have allowances for a band council and aspects of self-governance), and the misguided assumption that Indigenous Canadians have no modernity or complexity in their various cultures. It was one of the first distinctly Canadian shows to explore these ideas.