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What's all the fuss about?

While on his trip to Brazil earlier this week, Prime Minister Paul Martin struck up a conversation with a curious Brazilian politician who peppered the prime minister with questions about Canada.

During their talk, taped by a television crew, Martin said Canada's three territories will one day become provinces.

National news organizations, such as the Globe and Mail and the CBC, ignorant of the issue and too lazy to research the context, pounced on Martin's casual comment. Then they reported it - as if it were a piece of actual news.

It's not news, of course. The idea that Nunavut and the other two territories will one day become provinces is unremarkable.

For nearly 40 years, federal government policy on northern political development - whether it be Liberal or Tory governments - has been based on the assumption that Canada's territories will one day become provinces.

Why else would the federal government spend four decades giving province-like powers to territorial governments, and encouraging the evolution of responsible government within territorial legislatures?

Provincehood has always been the long-term goal, especially since the influential Carrothers Commission report of the mid-1960s. The members of that commission recommended that Ottawa create a province-like government for the Northwest Territories based in Yellowknife, and give provincial-style powers to that government.

In turn, the federal government accepted those recommendations. That's how the territorial government got the power to run the schools, set up a system of municipal government, run its own economic development programs and eventually take over the federal government's hospitals and nursing stations.

In the 1980s, Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservative government, being more sympathetic to territorial provincehood than the federal Liberals, sped up the process.

After 1985, they started giving the NWT government its money every year in one single chunk of cash - and let the territorial government decide on its own how to spend it.

That was the beginning of the "formula financing" agreements between Ottawa and the territories, the method still used to provide Nunavut with most of the revenue that it gets from Ottawa every year to run the government. Afterwards, territorial legislatures in Yellowknife and Whitehorse began to run their own affairs, with no interference from the commissioner and other non-elected federal bureaucrats.

So in 1999, the new Nunavut government benefited from nearly 30 years worth of political development work that had taken place within the NWT legislature. That's why Nunavut - new though it was - emerged on Day One with most of the powers and responsibilities possessed by provinces.

So in stating that the three territories will one day become provinces, Martin merely states the obvious.

The only real questions are about when the remaining powers will be devolved, and about how the constitution will be amended to allow new northern provinces to join Confederation as true equals.

There are now only three big areas left where territories do not have the authority that provinces have: control over natural resources, the right to regulate labour relations, and the right to run a Crown prosecutor's office.

Of these, it's control over natural resources - and the ability to collect royalties and taxes - that's most important to Nunavut and the other territories. Premier Paul Okalik has rightly made this a priority for the government, and has pledged to negotiate a deal with Ottawa before the next territorial election.

For Nunavut, however, provincehood itself will not be an issue for many, many decades. Nunavut is simply too poor and too dependent on Ottawa right now.

But the Northwest Territories, soon to be benefit from a multi-billion dollar natural gas pipeline project down the Mackenzie Valley, could be financially self-sufficient within a very short time.

That's why the people of Nunavut should pay attention to what's happening with our old friends in the NWT. What's developed there first often pops up here soon after. JB

Recycled puppy food

Have you ever seen how a female dog or wolf will sometimes put food into her stomach and then vomit the partially digested stuff back out for her pups to eat?

That’s what the government of Nunavut did for us this week in its speech from the throne, read before the Regurgitative Assembly of Nunavut in Iqaluit this past Tuesday. It’s a pre-digested mish-mash of vague items ingested from the past government’s agenda, then spewed back out to the public.

Throne speeches are supposed to outline the government’s plans and priorities for the coming year. One hopes, normally, that a new government might manage to produce some new plans and new ideas, especially a government that’s been in office for seven months.

But the recycled contents of this throne speech reveal that this government has no new plans and no new ideas. Except for two or three minor announcements, there is virtually nothing in this speech that we haven’t heard many, many times before.

Take language and culture, for example. The throne speech says “your government is working on new language legislation.” We already knew that. Indeed, we’ve been waiting for an amended Official Languages Act since 1999. And we’ve been waiting almost as long to see if the government will also introduce an Inuktitut protection act.

The same goes for their promise to start planning for a new territorial museum, or heritage centre. Again, this project — which must be carried out to comply with the Nunavut land claims agreement — has been “worked on” since at least 1999. No news there, especially when you consider that the GN has not said that they will actually build it.

The economic development section of the speech is equally vacuous — and hypocritical. The speech brags, for example, that the Nunavut fishery is “on the threshold of expansion” and that its “outlook is strong.”

But just two weeks ago, MPs on the House of Commons fisheries committee began a major probe of the GN-sponsored Baffin Fisheries Coalition and its turbot quota. Around the same time, Jose Kusugak, the president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, issued a stern condemnation of the trawling methods used by most of the BFC’s boats.

Where is the GN’s political strategy for handling these criticisms? You won’t find it in the throne speech. But if the GN can’t find one, the BFC, along with the GN’s hopes for the fishery, could end up being destroyed. This is an issue that could get very ugly, very quickly, but there’s no sign the GN is even aware of what’s going on.

In other areas, such as health care, education, justice, and housing, there are long lists of things that the government either announced long ago, or which the public knows about already through other means.

To be fair, there’s the odd new announcement scattered here and there among the sludge: one 24-hour care centre for elders per year, a new law to help victims of family violence, one more correctional healing facility, and an energy conservation campaign.

The Nunavut government used the mouth of the commissioner, Peter Irniq, to fill the air with words for an hour. It’s too bad they had so little to say. JB

November 12, 2004

Take a good long look

The next time you step outside, take a good long look around. What you will see is how the Arctic has looked for at least 10,000 years and you may be among the last of the many generations who can say they have seen it that way.

By 2100, trees will grow as far north as Kugluktuk, Rankin Inlet, Coral Harbour and even Cambridge Bay. Most of the polar bears left on the planet will be in zoos: there won’t be enough sea ice for them to travel and hunt on. And in the summer, there will be little sea-ice anywhere, except, perhaps, around the North Pole. Ringed seal and walrus, now plentiful, may become endangered species. Lemmings, snowy owls and arctic foxes may vanish from lands where they now flourish.

At the same time, structures built on steel piles driven into the rock-like hardness of the permafrost will sag and fall apart. Cancers, cataracts and immune system diseases caused by ultraviolet radiation will proliferate among Arctic peoples. Giant tankers and cargo ships will steam through the ice-free waters of the Northwest Passage, while drilling platforms will dot the ice-free waters around the High Arctic islands, sucking natural gas from beneath the floor of the Arctic ocean.

We now know all this because of a gargantuan report on global warming and the Arctic commissioned by the eight-nation Arctic Council. It represents four years of work by nearly 300 scientists, assisted by the knowledge of many hundreds of aboriginal people throughout the circumpolar world.

Their efforts are aimed at reaching as many people as possible: especially political leaders in the eight Arctic nations and the ordinary people who elect them.

Though a 140-page plain-language summary of the report, called Impacts of a Warming Arctic: Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, was officially unveiled this week in Reykjavik, Iceland, much of its message is not new. Its authors have been leaking information to the media since last January, when Nunatsiaq News began to report on the story.

But even if many parts of the report are not entirely new, its effect is startling. Humans are entering a period of rapid climate change the likes of which have not been seen for at least 10,000 years. So far, we’re not even close to figuring out how to do what it will take to slow it down. And our political leaders are totally unprepared.

Take Nunavut, for example, a territory that spans most of the Canadian Arctic and a territory that climate change will transform with a vengeance. Not one GN official, elected or non-elected, bothered to show up in Reykjavik. It’s no surprise to once again find that the GN is absent-without-cause. On the issues that most affect the people of Nunavut, it usually is absent-without-cause.

But what’s worse is that the Nunavut government has no clear energy policy, and little or no capacity to develop one and carry it out. Global warming, after all, is an energy issue. It’s about the burning of oil, gas and coal to heat buildings, create electricity and power the engines of motor vehicles. That is what is responsible for the greenhouse effect that causes global warming.

The Nunavut energy secretariat that produced the two Ikuma reports has been dissolved. As world oil prices soar, and global warming looms, the Government of Nunavut has decided, apparently, to abandon the issue.

The federal government is also badly unprepared. As officials with Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami pointed out this week, Canada has no national climate change assessment office.

Another area where Canada is failing to pull its weight is in support for Arctic science. Canada claims stewardship over one-third of the planet’s Arctic region. But most of the scientific work that you will find in the ACIA report has been done by researchers from the U.S., Scandinavia, and the U.K. Even this week, frustrated Canadian scientists who made it to Reykjavik were complaining about Canada’s lack of support for their vital work.

Not so long ago, global warming was an issue surrounded by legitimate doubt. But now the evidence is in and the jury has declared its verdict. There is no longer any doubt. JB

To download a copy of the ACIA report, go to amap.no/acia.

November 5, 2004

The GN: a haven of racism and incompetence?

The most despicable aspect of Harbir Boparai’s untimely dismissal from the Government of Nunavut, of course, is the strong and well-substantiated suggestion that he is a victim of racism.

But his short, unhappy sojourn in Nunavut also raises many more serious questions about whether the premier, the cabinet, and the Nunavut government’s senior managers are even willing and able to do the basic work of government.

Boparai has already produced enough evidence to suggest that Nunavut’s cabinet ministers and senior civil servants have little or no interest in ensuring that the territorial government is staffed by competent people. His evidence suggests that their only real concern is the manipulation of public perception, through cynical pandering and lying.

First, the allegations of racism:

Boparai, who is of South Asian descent, asserts that he is the victim of malicious, racist rumours that circulated among some Panniqtuuq residents after he was hired for a short, four-month term position. At the time, he happened to be staying with another man who is also of South Asian descent.

The rumour-mongers assumed that the two men were related, and that Boparai’s housemate somehow conspired to get his friend a job. This is the kind of crude racist stereotype that non-white immigrants to Canada have endured for many, many decades: let one of them into the country and they’ll bring all their relatives. Right?

It’s not the government’s fault those rumours arose. That, unfortunately, is human nature.

But the government, by its own admission, chose to act on them. And that makes the Government of Nunavut a party to a racist act. In accepting those racist rumours as being worthy of action, the GN, from the premier’s office on down, has validated them.

The government, of course, claims otherwise. In documents acquired through the Access to Information and Privacy Act, government officials say that Boparai’s contract was terminated to ensure “fairness and equity.”

But when Boparai re-applied for the job afterwards, no one at the GN responded to him. Why not? This, after all, is a young man with a university degree in economics seeking a job with the Department of — guess what? — Economic Development.

It’s also worth noting that for the short time he was there, he was the only person in his division who held a degree in economics. Meanwhile, two Inuit hired at around the same time, in the same manner, and under similar contracts, were allowed to keep their jobs as project managers. Since the only discernible difference between them and Boparai is race, the logical conclusion is that racism was the only relevant factor in their decision.

The documents show that the premier’s office was involved in the decision to get rid of Boparai. They also suggest that Human Resources Minister Louis Tapardjuk may have been involved too.

Why? It’s highly unusual in any government, even the Government of Nunavut, for cabinet ministers to become directly involved in the hiring of low-level government workers. This evidence suggests that there is a willingness by elected politicians to interfere with a public service that is supposed to be non-political. That, in turn, suggests a short, slippery road to the grossest forms of corruption in government.

It happens that the premier, Paul Okalik, and the assistant deputy minister who ordered that Boparai’s contract by terminated, Rosemary Keenainak, are from Panniqtuuq, the community where Boparai worked and where the malicious rumours arose. Was cronyism or nepotism a factor? We don’t know. But because of the actions of their respective offices, that question is now out there.

It is also the case that the Department of Economic Development and Transportation is one of many departments that have been carpet-bombed into near-total dysfunction by the GN’s badly-implemented decentralization policy.

The innovation division, where Boparai was to have been employed, suffered from at least four longstanding full-time staff vacancies. “We are facing serious capacity issues...,” his supervisor said in an e-mail to the human resources minister on July 8.

That is a comment that could be made about many parts of the GN, especially those divisions whose employees are supposed to generate the vital information the territorial government needs to make good decisions on behalf of Nunavut residents.

The Bureau of Statistics, for example, has now evaporated. The GN ordered that the office be moved to Pang, and every single employee refused to move. There is now one lonely manager there, charged with the thankless task of rebuilding the entire bureau. Similarly, the wildlife division, which was decimated by a forced move from Iqaluit to Igloolik, has never recovered. That division still consists of a mostly empty office, staffed by ghosts.

Despite all this, the Nunavut government still pretends that economic development is one of its major priorities. The Nunavut government still pretends that capacity building is a major goal. The Nunavut government still pretends that it is committed to human rights.

We now know that none of that is true. The least that they could do is stop lying about it. JB

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