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Editorial

April 25, 2003 - Education a priority?
April 18, 2003 - Shaming the Nunavut government
April 11, 2003 - He's the boss
April 4, 2003 - Nunavut turns four

April 25, 2003

Education a priority?

On June 17, 1999, the 19 Nunavut MLAs elected that year emerged from a three-day "retreat" in Baker Lake to declare their priorities.

Education and housing issues, they announced, would sit at the very top of their to-do list, and education was at the very top of that list.

The emphasis on education made its way into the Bathurst Mandate later that summer:
"A government-wide effort to support training and learning for a Nunavut-based workforce is one of the two primary commitments of this government's mandate."

Election time is judgment time, and a territorial election is just around the corner. How are the government and MLAs to be judged on their performance on the education issue?
So far, they've performed about as well as the Toronto Maple Leafs perform in the Stanley Cup playoffs – with hope, heart and good intentions. But by the end of the series, they've accomplished nothing.

Consider their performance on the Education Act. After going into triple overtime, they finished the game by firing the puck into their own net.

It all started back in October 1999, when James Arvaluk – remember him? – was minister of education. On Oct. 22, 1999, Arvaluk made a minister's statement to announce that work had started on the creation of a new Education Act for Nunavut. He called it "an initiative that will impact on the development of education in Nunavut for many years to come."

Right. Four year later, after dreary rounds of confused "consultations" and drafting efforts, they finally put Bill 1, their attempt to write a made-in-Nunavut education law, out of its misery.

On the infrastructure front, they've done better. Over the past couple of years they've allocated increasing amounts of capital dollars to pay for badly needed school renovations and added classroom space in a variety of communities. These are welcome measures.

But on the development of effective Nunavut-made education policies, the legislative assembly and the government have remained frozen in time. Parents and employers still have no guarantees that high school graduates are able to even read their diplomas – in any known language.

In Iqaluit, the recent debate over a proposal by the district education authority to conduct standardized tests supplied by Alberta in Iqaluit schools may have been confused and inconclusive. But at least it was a debate. MLAs have yet to conduct one, which makes one wonder what they were actually thinking when they decided that education is one of their two top priorities.

The Iqaluit controversy at least reminded us that Nunavut's school system has no tools to measure the performance of schools, teachers and students. Without such tools, those who run the school system can never be held to account for their failures, or honestly lauded for their successes. Without such tools, citizens will never gain access to the information they need to hold the system accountable.

As for Arctic College, there is little evidence that many MLAs even know of the college's existence. Despite the central role that this institution plays in job-training and literacy development for Nunavummiut, MLAs rarely ask any questions about it.

That makes you wonder if MLAs even knew what they were signing off on when they agreed that "a government-wide effort to support training and learning for a Nunavut-based workforce" would sit high up on their agenda. How many other sections of the Bathurst Mandate have they never read? JB

April 18, 2003

Shaming the Nunavut government

When Nunavut's finance department created its first in-house budget, in 2000-01, the capital portion stood at just $66 million.

The year after that, it climbed to $71.1 million. Last year, it rose to an estimated $99.8 million.

In the fiscal year that started on April 1 the Nunavut government plans to fork out more than $143 million by way of its capital budget.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with government jargon, the "capital" budget is the document that puts aside money to pay the one-time costs of physical structures like buildings, equipment, supplies and renovations.

In three years, Nunavut's capital budget tripled, mostly because the government decided to spend all but $2 million of its accumulated surpluses before the next election. The big spending comes just in time for incumbent MLAs to wow the voters with pre-election ground-breaking ceremonies all over Nunavut. What a convenient coincidence.

It also means that there's no excuse whatsoever for the continued absence of either a women's correctional centre or a women's remand facility in Nunavut.

This month, a 19-year-old Iqaluit woman charged with a variety of offences spent four nights at the all-male Baffin Correctional Centre. A justice of the peace ordered that she be held there on remand after she twice failed to show up in court.

"Remand" is the word used to describe the form of detention for accused persons who can't be trusted to obey the law or show up in court while they're waiting for their charges to be dealt with.

Most accused persons, especially those charged with petty crimes, aren't held in custody until their trials or plea-bargain hearings come up, and they're released on a promise to appear in court at a designated date. Usually, it's only those charged with extremely violent offences, such as murder, or those who pose a serious flight risk, who are held in remand. And the Crown must always persuade a judge that there's just cause for detaining a person who has yet to be convicted.

Remand is also used for people who can't find a way of showing up for their promised court dates. In these cases, the courts often have no choice but to order that an accused person be held until he or she is due to appear.

Such was the case of the 19-year-old Iqaluit woman who appeared before justice of the peace Bill Riddell this month. Since there was no evidence, apparently, that she would be capable of honouring any future promises, he ordered that she be held in remand until her next court appearance.

This time, however, he ordered that she not be held at the RCMP lock-up in Iqaluit. The only alternatives to detention there are the overcrowded Baffin Correctional Centre or a long and expensive plane ride to a small women's correctional centre in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories - the only women's correctional facility in the northern territories.

It's not surprising then, that the Government of Nunavut sent its lawyers to court in an attempt to overturn Riddell's decision.

A large proportion of BCC's inmate population is made up of hard-core repeat offenders convicted of sexual assaults, wife-beating and other crimes of violence against women. To protect and care for a single female remand prisoner in such an environment would surely place a great burden on BCC's staff, who are already coping with the stresses of a badly overcrowded institution.

Unbelievably, BCC was originally designed as a co-ed institution. In the 1980s, male and female offenders were actually confined there, together, under the same roof. But this mushy headed policy turned into an unmitigated disaster after a series of sex scandals rocked the territorial government of the day. Those scandals included the sexual harassment of female prisoners by male guards. Since about 1991, no female offenders have been housed at BCC – until now.

On paper, Nunavut is responsible for operating a justice system. But in reality, Nunavut does not have the infrastructure to perform this task.

Why? Because Nunavut is run mostly by people who get all defensive and squirmy when icky-poo subjects like crime, violence and public safety are put before them.

Those who planned for the creation of Nunavut, including the Nunavut Implementation Commission, paid little attention to justice and corrections issues, likely for the same reason. The construction of new correctional facilities was never identified as one of the reasonable incremental costs of creating Nunavut.

And it remains a rock-bottom low priority for Nunavut MLAs. Since Nunavut has the highest per capita rate of violent crime in Canada, you would think that more correctional centre spaces would rank high on their to-do list.

But this dim-witted group seems incapable of making that simple connection. Instead, they've chosen to spend the government's entire surplus this year on a long list of feel-good, vote-for-me projects.

It's a good sign, though, that this issue is ending up in court. Perhaps only the courts can shame the Nunavut government into taking its corrections responsibilities seriously. JB

April 11, 2003

He's the boss

If you want understand why Premier Paul Okalik shuffled his cabinet and reassigned such a large number of senior managers last week, the first thing you must do is ignore all the nonsense about Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit and the Bathurst Mandate.

This is what Okalik is quoted as saying in a GN press release announcing the civil service job switches: "I am committed to using the values in the Bathurst Mandate as a tool to build a government that promotes Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit. These changes will help realize the goal of building a public service that is reflective of all the people it seeks to serve."

Yeah, right.

The Bathurst Mandate never did mean much. For those of you who have yet to see it, it reads like a peyote-inspired dream-fantasy, a kind of infantile wish-list of things that Nunavut is supposed to have by 2020. Nunavut MLAs made it all up in 1999, allegedly through consensus, after a series of behind-closed-doors retreats. One of the more amusing items in it says Nunavut will have a single time zone.

The words "Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit," on the other hand, actually do mean something, depending on the context. But in the context of last week's senior job assignments, they're meaningless. Like the words "Bathurst Mandate," the government, as it so often does, is using the words "Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit" as a political marketing slogan, tacked on to conceal motives it would rather not acknowledge.

As for what the premier's real motives are, we'll never know. But there's no reason to believe they're illegitimate motives.

It's the premier's prerogative to assign cabinet portfolios. By demoting Peter Kilabuk to the community government and CLEY portfolios and by elevating Manitok Thompson to Education, Okalik did nothing surprising.

The department of education has become a serious political liability for the government, and it's to be expected that the premier would at least put on a show of concern about it. In reality, though, not much of anything is likely to happen in that department between now and the next election. Thompson's role will be that of an agreeable caretaker.

In his complex reassignment of senior officials, Okalik is displaying another power of the premier that's not so well publicized – the power to decide where senior non-elected officials will work.

He has appointed a new boss of all bosses, John Walsh, who will move from the community government department to become the new deputy minister of the executive and secretary to cabinet. Walsh replaces Anne Crawford, who will look after the department of health and social services until a permanent deputy minister for health, Bernie Blais, arrives in July.

It's the kind of job that Walsh has done before, in the Yukon, and his new appointment is a sign that Okalik wants to strengthen the premier's dominance of the civil service.

Another significant move is Okalik's hiring of his old friend and former campaign manager, Kirt Ejesiak, as principle secretary – the top job in the premier's office.

Although this appointment smells like cronyism, it's the premier's prerogative to hire his own people to staff his own office, just like other cabinet ministers. The principal secretary's job, however, has been a revolving door since 1999 – Ejesiak is the fourth or fifth person to hold it.

The most experienced and competent person to ever hold the principal secretary's job, Paul McKinstry, didn't last long. He left his job abruptly in 2001, amid a cloud of rumours that suggested his work was being undermined by others close to the premier. It remains to be seen whether Eejesiak can provide Okalik with the kind of political advice that he needs to hear.

Okalik's announcement last week may have conveyed a vague and confusing message to the public. But his unspoken message to the GN employees was clear: he's the boss. JB

April 4, 2003

Nunavut turns four

Canada’s newest colony, Nunavut, turned four this week, an event marked by a resounding chorus of indifference.

If you blinked, you might have missed it. Or you may have been too busy doing something useful, such as pulling fun April Fool’s jokes on your friends.

It’s understandable that no one in what passes for officialdom in Nunavut bothered to even mention it, though. Because the Nunavut they’re now forced to defend sits many painful steps below the Nunavut everyone thought they were getting.

Of course, we’re not supposed to "celebrate" Nunavut on April 1. That happens every July 9. That’s the day in 1993 when an obscure Tory cabinet minister by the name of Pauline Browes flew to Kugluktuk to proclaim the Nunavut land claims agreement a legal document that should more accurately be called "the Nunavut land surrender agreement."

That’s what it is: a surrender of land in exchange for money, certain prescribed rights, the retention of some tracts of land, and the ill-kept promise to create Nunavut contained in Article 4.

July 9 will mark the 10th anniversary of that event, and chastened Nunavut Tunngavik leaders will have the unenviable task of explaining why so little of the money earned by the investment of land claim compensation money is ever likely to be spent on socially useful purposes.

It also marks the expiry date of the implementation contract that’s attached to the land claims agreement. But it’s unlikely that this July 9 will mark the signing of a new implementation contract. NTI, the GN and a federal government that’s rapidly losing interest in Nunavut are still said to be far from reaching consensus. NTI, an organization now able to inspire voter turnouts of only 40 per cent, may have to hire a professional magician to conjure some illusion of success to celebrate on that day.

Meanwhile, the Nunavut government that was created by the words in Article 4 has learned how to walk, but only just — the sickly toddler of Confederation. Its so-called "partner," the federal government, is, more often than not, a ball and chain permanently attached to its ankle.

Four years after the creation of Nunavut, and 10 years after the proclamation of a land claims agreement once touted as a major instrument of Nunavut’s social and economic development, the social and economic development tools that really matter — education, health care, housing, and access to modern transportation and communications — hardly function in Nunavut.

That’s what real politics are about: education, health care, and housing. Without strength in those things, no group of people anywhere can develop their society to its full potential. Nunavut is no exception. And yet the provision of services in all those areas is still demonstrably weaker now than under the Government of the Northwest Territories.

Even the extra health care money the three territorial premiers negotiated with Prime Minister Jean Chrétien has yet to flow. The GN did not include it as projected revenue in its 2003-04 main estimates — and we still don’t know if it’s enough to pay the cost of future demand.

Within the Nunavut Housing Corporation there lies a ticking time bomb — the declining funding agreement between Nunavut and the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

Right now, Nunavut gets between $50 million and $60 million a year to pay for the operation and maintenance of its social housing stock. In 2020, the year when everyone in Nunavut will be living in Utopia, according to the Bathurst Mandate, that funding will stand at half it’s current level. After 2037, Nunavut will get zero dollars a year to operate and build social housing.

In education, whether it’s the K-12 system, adult vocational training or college and university, there’s no evidence that anyone’s even trying to make a serious difference. But at least the recent mercy killing of the GN’s botched education bill may help to re-focus public attention on real education issues. Nunavut’s biggest education problem isn’t the lack of a made-in-Nunavut education act — it’s the lack of a made-in-Nunavut curriculum, and the lack of any perceptible standards of excellence.

It’s no wonder, then, that no one wants to look when Nunavut’s birthday rolls around.

JB

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