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Inuit employment in government moving backward

NTI and GN use implementation contract in bid for more training money

JIM BELL

Richard Paton, NTI's chief operating officer, with Hugh Lloyd, the government of Nunavut's director of aborginal and circumpolar affairs. Both say Article 23 is failing.
(PHOTO BY KIRSTEN MURPHY)

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The Nunavut government and Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. are pulling out all the stops in an effort to pry millions of dollars a year out of the federal government for Inuit job training.

To help accomplish that, they've added a powerful new weapon to their arsenal – a massive report called Annaumaniq, prepared for NTI and the GN by PricewaterhouseCoopers, a national management consulting firm.

The report finds that territorial and federal governments are failing miserably in their attempts to implement the Inuit employment provisions in Article 23 of the Nunavut land claims agreement.

"It's important to note the reality that Article 23 is failing," said Richard Paton, NTI's chief operating officer, during an April 25 press conference held to release Annaumaniq.

The battlefield where they'll use that weapon is a two-year-old set of talks aimed at producing a new implementation contract for the land claims agreement.

Those talks ground to a halt in January.

"The negotiations stalled, and we looked to this process as one in which we would like to re-start the negotiations," said Hugh Lloyd, the GN's director of aboriginal and circumpolar affairs.

The implementation contract is a legal document between NTI, the GN and the Government of Canada. It sets out who's supposed to do what, and when, in carrying out the terms of the land claims agreement, and how much each party should pay.

The first implementation contract, negotiated in early 1993, expires on July 9. Negotiations aimed at creating a new one began in March 2001.

But it was a disagreement on how to deal with Article 23 that caused those talks to break off in January.

"Clearly, one of the issues was Article 23," Lloyd said.

In the first implementation contract, Ottawa provided only $160,000 over 10 years to implement Article 23. Lloyd said NTI and the GN believe that amount to be "grossly inadequate."

To carry out the Inuit employment provisions of Article 23 over the next 10 years in a way that's acceptable to NTI and the GN, the federal government will likely have to spend many times more than that.

"Estimates of training costs suggest many, many millions of dollars would be needed on an annual basis - $10 to $20 million probably.... We'd be looking at substantially more, perhaps $20 million a year. So that is a big jump," Lloyd said.

Will Ottawa make that "big jump?" NTI and GN officials say the chances are good.

"We feel very strongly that the position we're taking on the importance of Article 23 must be recognized by the Government of Canada.... We remain very optimistic that we will get the assistance that's needed," Lloyd said.

Most of the statistical evidence they're using to support their case is contained in the Annaumaniq report. NTI revealed parts of it in January during a public budget consultation in Iqaluit with John Manley, the federal finance minister.

The report confirms the damning indictment that was suggested in the figures NTI released at the time.

"[T]he implementation of Article 23 has demonstrated a lack of progress which amounts to a failure of implementation," the report says.

The long-term goal of Article 23 is to achieve a level of Inuit participation in government jobs equal to their proportion of Nunavut's population. Right now, that's about 85 per cent.

But the Nunavut government can't reach even the modest target of 50 per cent it was supposed to achieve by April 1, 1999.

On that day, the proportion of Inuit employees in the GN stood at 45 per cent. Now it stands at only 42 per cent.

"This is more than a failure to move forward; it is moving backward," the report says.

The federal government's record is even worse.

In 1999, 61 per cent of the people who worked for the department of Indian and northern affairs in Nunavut were Inuit. Now that number stands at 27 per cent.

Only 33 per cent of federal employees in Nunavut are Inuit.

And in each government, most Inuit employees tend to be concentrated "in a narrow band of lower skilled occupational groups and at the lower grade levels," the report says.

That means the average salary rate of Inuit in government jobs is 78.5 per cent of the average rate earned by non-Inuit, who dominate higher-paid jobs.

The report finds that the cost of these disparities is stupendous. In 2002-03, Nunavut Inuit lost $123 million in wages and housing subsidies because of the large number of government jobs that went to non-Inuit.

That produced $65 million in extra social costs for government, including social assistance, lost income tax revenue, and turnover-related hiring expenses.

And a table in Volume 2 of the report projects that over the next 10 years, if the current low levels of Inuit employment in government continue, it will cost Inuit a whopping $1.2 billion.

• See also: Article 23: some quick facts
  
  

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