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Have money, will travel: U.S. grant fund eyes Nunavut

"You want to make sure you put your best foot forward, and I think we did that"

JIM BELL

Officials from the MacArthur Foundation, one of America's 10 largest charitable funds, visited Nunavut last week to start talking to people about how the organization's enormous wealth can be used to help Nunavut and the Arctic.

Based in Chicago, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation gives more than $200 million a year to causes around the globe, out of investment income earned by its $4 billion fund.

The foundation's president, Jonathan Fanton, along with board member Lloyd Axworthy, sat down last weekend with representatives from several organizations and the Nunavut government at a bed and breakfast hotel in Iqaluit.

Sheila Watt-Cloutier, the president of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, said she's been talking to Axworthy for more than a year about getting the MacArthur Foundation more involved in Nunavut.

She said the foundation has a strong interest in the environment, sustainable development and human rights, which matches the ICC's recent efforts aimed at showing how global warming affects the human rights of Inuit.

"The Arctic is a global barometer right now," Watt-Cloutier said.

Other Inuit leaders included Ben Kovic of the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board, Joanasie Akumalik of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., and Meeka Mike and Pitseolak Alainga of the Iqaluit hunters and trappers organization.

"We had a really good group of people to meet with, a good cross-section," said Education Minister Ed Picco, who represented the Nunavut government, along with Economic Development Minister David Simailak.

Axworthy, a once-powerful Liberal cabinet minister, is no stranger to Nunavut. As Canada's foreign affairs minister, he presided over the creation of the eight-nation Arctic Council at its founding meeting in Iqaluit in 1998. Travelling with him was David Anderson, the Liberal MP for Victoria who served as environment minister in the last government.

Picco said the group talked about a wide range of subjects, including global warming, climate change, education, co-management systems for protecting the environment, sustainable development, Inuit hunting, and problems created by the U.S. Marine Mammals Protection Act.

It's still too early to say what the MacArthur Foundation will be willing to support, and how much money they'll be willing to give to Nunavut interests.

But Picco said it was important to avoid the fiasco that occurred back in 2000 when representatives of the multi-billion-dollar Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation came to Nunavut to talk about giving money and free computers to the library system - and no one in Nunavut wanted to talk to them.

"We stepped up to the plate, but no one came," said a Gates Foundation spokesperson in the summer of 2000. Eventually, though, the Gates organization provided Nunavut with a $486,000 grant after education officials scrambled to undo their initial blunder.

But this time, Nunavut officials were ready to accommodate the visiting philanthropists.

"You're trying to make the case for Nunavut, to try to gain some advocacy. When these guys come in, you want to make sure you put your best foot forward, and I think we did that," Picco said.

You can find more information about the MacArthur at www.macfdn.org.

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