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Gun safety suffers as registry dispute drags on

“Personally, I think we’re quite far behind”

SARA MINOGUE

A Nasittuq employee checks to make sure a rifle is unloaded in a firearms safety course taught by Wes Smith in Iqaluit last week. (PHOTOS BY SARA MINOGUE)

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He had just enough time to tell his wife he loved her, before he passed away, leaving her to find help from a group of people camped about a mile away.

Firearms accidents like these can happen, but preventable deaths can also occur.

This past July, seven-year-old Jobie Kadlak of Rankin Inlet died of a single gunshot wound when he and another boy were playing with a gun inside a cabin on the edge of town. The death was ruled accidental, but a man was charged with unsafe storage of a firearm.

Since April 1, 1999, there have been four accidental deaths in Nunavut involving firearms, three of which were in Cape Dorset. There have also been two homicides involving guns.

The biggest cause of death related to firearms in Canada is suicide. In Nunavut, 34 out of 170 suicides since April 1999 have been with a gun. That’s about 20 per cent of all suicides.

It’s enough to concern Nunavut’s chief coroner, Tim Nealy.

“[Gun safety] is something I’ve been looking at,” Nealy said. “We do have some encouraging news now that we have a firearms officer back in Nunavut. For quite a while we didn’t really have anything.”

The Canada Firearms Centre, which administers the gun registry in Canada, had nobody in Iqaluit for about a year. Inquiries to a 1-800 number were forwarded to Winnipeg, to someone who visited the territory about every three months.

New firearms officer in Nunavut

This March, Kevin Robertson took up the job of firearms officer for Nunavut — moving into his Iqaluit office next to the Baffin Hair & Tanning Studio in July after attending several training courses in the South.

The CFC declares itself responsible for public gun safety in Canada.

“The entire Canadian Firearms Program is about public safety,” a spokesperson for the CFC wrote in a 2004 letter to the editor in the National Post.

“The Chief Firearms Officers for each province are responsible for the implementation and delivery of the Canadian Firearms Safety Program in accordance with the Canada Firearms Centre’s safety standards and policies,” the letter reads.

But in Nunavut, the CFC has yet to fill the void that has been left as gun safety issues are volleyed back and forth from the Government of Nunavut to hamlet councils to Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. That’s putting Nunavummiut in a dangerous position.

When it comes to gun safety in Nunavut, “personally, I think we’re quite far behind,” Robertson said.

Robertson’s describes his two main responsibilities as, “licencing and safety training.”

“I’m here so the public can come in and say, I have problem, I want to do this, how do I get from here to there, be it in training or in registration of a firearms.”

In fact, he says his main concern is safety, but “there’s just no money.”

When asked what the CFC’s budget for Nunavut is for the year, he confesses he has no idea.

In Nunavut, the CFC has no official plans to implement any training, although Robertson has helped several individual trainers to hold courses and is working on producing kits — composed of decommissioned guns and ammunition — to send to the trainers in the communities.

“It’s our organization that provides the materials but they don’t supply the manpower,” Robertson said.

He’s also working on organizing a master training session in order to train more firearms safety instructors. But as the lone man in Nunavut, Robertson also has a backlog of cases to investigate, where he must decide whether to prohibit criminals from holding a firearms licence.

When it comes to gun registration, Robertson doesn’t know exactly what the compliance rate is.

“I would suspect that you could walk into just about any house in any settlement in Nunavut and you would find at least one firearm that’s not been registered,” he said, adding that it’s not his job to enforce the law.

How safe are we?

Are there enough safety courses in Nunavut?

Nobody knows the answer to this question, but Robertson speculates.

“I know that down South, when I was in Winnipeg for close to two months, that there were an awful lot of firearms courses put on. A lot. Every weekend you’d find a firearms course somewhere.”

In Robertson’s opinion, more needs to be done. He’d like to see elders going into schools to talk about gun safety.

“One of our great assets here is our Rangers,” he said.

For many hunters, gun safety is a fact of life.

Michael Qappik, former head of the Amarok Hunters and Trappers Association in Iqaluit, can list gun safety rules on command, and is teaching his son to do the same.

His guns are locked up, and are transported in a gun case, “even in the boat on the way hunting.”

“I think it’s better to take the course, myself,” said Qappiq, who has been hunting most of his life.

In his experience, courses aren’t too hard to come by in Iqaluit, but he and his wife Maggie both had the advantage of cadets, where they first learned firearm safety.

But not everyone has been so lucky.

At an Iqaluit city council meeting last October, Glen Williams raised the issue of gun safety in response to several late night incidents involving guns.

“I know people over 30 who don’t know any aspects of firearm safety whatsoever,” Councillor Simanuk Kilabuk said during the debate. “We do need to provide some education and awareness.”

The city has yet to produce any formal plan for gun safety awareness or education.

Right now, Nunavut is “in a fog,” said the CFC’s Robertson.

“It’s hard to say which way it’s going, and which direction. And I think it will be (confused) until the government of Nunavut can sit down with the federal individuals involved and come to some kind of agreement... because the people are the ones that are suffering right now. They’re the ones that don’t have the training.”

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