Found the missing year! The helpful people at the University of Alberta Archives and in the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library tracked down The Gateway run for the 1970/1971 academic year. The newspaper continued to publish and report on the activities of students, it just wasn’t digitized so the archives is sending the hard copies to me.
One of the odd things about the University of Alberta Library and Archives relationship is the student newspaper is not part of the Library collection (I discovered this when looking for the microfilm rolls in the stacks during the first attempt to find the missing year). The Gateway in both microfilm and hard copy are held by the Archives, but the university stopped microfilming the paper after the 1969/1970 academic year. As odd as this practice is – most other universities hold their student newspapers in microfilm form as part of their newspaper collection – it is not unheard of. When doing preliminary research at the University of Victoria I had to go to the archives to access any of The Martlet issues from the 1970s onwards.

It is a great relief to have found the missing issues and as soon as I return from a week in Madison Wisconsin for the annual ASEH conference reading through them will be the first thing I do.

Now to finish a presentation about air pollution and Edmonton and UAlberta and the tar sands…