Current ads
Jobs
Tenders
Notices
General

Click below

March 31, 2006

Good food equals good health

A guest editorial

March is Nutrition Month in Canada, but for many people, nutrition is a concern every day of the year. Health problems such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer, obesity and childhood malnutrition are related to what we eat.

The traditional Inuit lifestyle provided what people need to be healthy, physically, mentally, socially and spiritually: healthy fats from marine mammals to keep blood flowing and bones strong, protein to build healthy muscles, iron for healthy blood, plenty of physical activity to keep bodies in shape, and the sharing of foods to keep community bonds strong.

In fact, it was Inuit who taught the world about the benefits of marine mammal fats! These healthy fats from seal, whale, walrus, polar bear and from fish have been shown to keep blood strong and blood vessels clear, and help to prevent heart attack and stroke.

Not only in Nunavut, but throughout the world, recent changes to traditional lifestyles have resulted in people eating less healthy diets and being less active, which has led to weight gain, and sometimes, to disease.

Nutrition is important to prevent disease in adults, but it is also plays a critical role in keeping babies and children healthy. In Nunavut, some babies and children develop diseases that are caused by poor nutrition, resulting in weak bones and blood, and poor growth and brain development.

At the same time, we know that rates of obesity in children are rising, putting them at risk of developing diabetes and other chronic diseases down the road, which will compromise the quality of their life and could shorten their life span.

There are many ways to invest in the health of children, at an individual and a community level:

• Breastfeed your baby and encourage others to do this. Breast milk is the perfect food for babies.
• Be sure that you and your baby take the iron or vitamins prescribed by your nurse or doctor.
• Give country foods to your children. Country foods are rich in iron, vitamins and all the essential nutrients — if children start eating country food when they are young they develop a taste for it.
• Help to make country foods available to pregnant women and children in your community.
• Cut down the amount of pop children drink and substitute it with water or milk.
• Never give pop to babies.
• Discourage pop and chips at the schools in your community — they are a leading cause of obesity in children. They’re filling, but have few nutrients.

Efforts to support nutrition in communities are ongoing. Food banks and soup kitchens as well as programs like the Canada Prenatal Nutrition Program, breakfast programs for schools, the food mail subsidy and hunter support programs are helping to alleviate food scarcity.

Still, more can be done about food poverty if we are to see real improvement in the nutrition and health of Nunavummiut.

At the policy level, efforts to tackle income and food pricing must continue so that it is more affordable to eat a healthy diet. It is a challenge when less nutritious foods at the stores are often cheaper than healthier choices, and are also convenient, fast, packaged attractively and tasty. At the same time, creative ways of supporting availability and access to country foods must continue.

Healthy eating is an important way to prevent children from developing chronic diseases, such as heart disease and diabetes, which are common in southern Canada, but are still not common among Inuit in Nunavut. Chronic disease will be a burden on the health sector as well as on the economy of the territory, which depends on healthy workers.

Above all, we have the opportunity to prevent the tragedy of suffering that chronic disease presents. If we don’t commit now to protect the health and wellbeing of our children, we will all pay a far greater price in years to come.

Dr. Geraldine Osborne, Associate Chief Medical Officer of Health
Amy Caughey, Nutritionist
Andrew Tagak Sr., IQ Coordinator
Department of Health and Social Services
Government of Nunavut

March 17, 2006

GN staff housing policy threatens public services

This article was contributed by a long-term resident of Nunavut who wished to remain anonymous.

The future of Nunavut’s government may be at stake with the recent announcements about raising their employees’ rents to “economic rates” over the next five to 10 years.

The Government of Nunavut is in a financial crisis.

The housing part of the GN’s money problems was generated by the governments of Canada, the Northwest Territories and the Office of the Interim Commissioner wrestling with the problem of creating enough housing to staff government jobs in “decentralized communities.”

The required housing was hugely expensive to generate on short notice. In the end, private financing was generated by the GN concluding leases with northern developers. That made sense since the benefits were intended to flow somehow to northern landlords and re-circulate in the Nunavut economy.

Some units were actually built for sale in the decentralized communities, but, unfortunately for the GN, did not sell. The building costs were astonishingly high and GN recruits living in the communities were not assured that they could turn around and sell them for the high prices for which they were built. The quality of the units was doubtful in many communities, and recent maintenance problems have proven that early GN employees were wise to be wary about house purchases for work assignments that had horizons of only several years.

Guaranteed house buy-back programs for staff who purchase housing and later leave the community due to transfer were not offered to GN staff, as was necessary in the NWT for many years to develop true housing markets in small communities.

The current plan to get out of housing leases and charge GN employees “market-level rents” is seen as a way to both reduce GN housing costs and normalize the housing market in Nunavut. If nothing else, the GN wants to stop over-heating Nunavut’s housing markets.

Will the GN’s good intentions produce results?

Housing markets are a balance between supply and demand. The GN housing policy says that, by increasing rents charged to staff, it will work towards encouraging staff to own their own homes, which in turn will encourage more construction of private housing and eventually moderate the rents charged by the current property owners.

While the GN intent is good and the final outcome may eventually be successful, can the government itself and the people of Nunavut stand the pain of disruption to the shaky GN staffing and retention situation in the meantime?

I have several more questions.

• Are strategies in place to carry the GN through the uncertainty that is building in an already demoralized public service?
• Is the housing corporation worried about how to supply certified accounting professionals required by the Auditor-Generals criticisms about slow progress towards financial accountability? Qualified, experienced, finance staff is in short supply across Canada.
• Is the president of the housing corporation talking to the minister of human resources about how to retain the needed employees for all GN jobs, at the same time as it is about to lose a whole generation of senior employees rapidly approaching retirement in the next five years?
• Has the premier asked his minister of human resources to coordinate a staffing supply and demand projection for all departments that indicates it has strong enough salaries, benefits as well as staff morale to maintain current staffing — and then include the housing-imposed stresses it is currently generating?
• Does the president of the housing corporation have plans to pay the enormous costs to re-staff each single open position in the GN that would be generated by a flight of current staff?

Even if these conditions have been met, there is a crucial oversight in the plan: The GN housing policy will not grow the supply of housing in Iqaluit.

Incentives to get out of government staff housing are not the problem. Interest in private ownership has been red-hot since 1999. Pre-approved mortgages have piled up, gathering dust at the banks, for lack of homes — at any price. Does anybody reading this not have several friends waiting to buy anything that comes onto the market? Does any reader not have a personal story about potential buyers lining up to bid on houses coming on the market six months in advance?

There is an urgent need for a far greater supply of privately-owned units at a range of prices.

Filling that need requires all levels of government to work with developers to open up whole sub-divisions, to build large-scale apartment-style developments every year until the land and housing supply are close to normal. We don’t need 30 to 60 land lots. Iqaluit needs 300 to 400 units for sale at a range of prices right now.

Nunavut needs a housing summit led by the premier, the federal ministers responsible for Indian and Northern Affairs and housing, the city of Iqaluit’s mayor and council — and must include northern developers and invited developers from the South who are familiar with opening regulated sub-divisions without public tax incentives.

March 10, 2006

What goes around, comes around

Please — stop with your violence now

This article was contributed by someone in Nunavik who does not wish to be identified.

Today you are fit, and you are able to take your wife and toss her across the room.

You are able to slap and punch her in the face, or anywhere on her body and she is not able to defend herself from you, because you’re angry and physically stronger. You are able to tell her that you can take her life, with your words, and put the fear into her that she will not report it to the police.

She is full of scars, which she has to see daily, and as time passes you see those scars too. But you can’t look at them, because you are ashamed. Deep down you know it was not right, but at that time you felt she deserved it.

You raise your right hand to strike your wife in front of your child.

How do you think your child is responding to this? Do you think he or she is going to talk to anybody in his class or to the police or to social services?

The child will take it out on another defenceless child in the community or on the school grounds, just as defenceless as your wife was when she was unable to protect herself from your anger, your hatred and your physical strength.

You are at work or you’re sitting at home and you have no clue that your child is crying out for help. The only way for your children to get attention and respect is violence — the way you are showing them.

You want your wife to respect you and fear you and do as you say and you’re doing it with anger, or because you are the man of the house, or because you are the man, period.

Face it. You’re a coward, because you use violence to shut her up.

I know you are fit today and you are able to take your wife down with a single punch to the body.

Picture a time when you are 50 years old. Ten to 15 years have gone by since you last struck your wife. You depend on your son or daughter for their physical strength to get the day-to-day chores done, chores that you were able to do in your days when you were beating your wife. Do you think your child will be there for you?

I think your son will be saying “this is what I grew up with” and they will be verbally or physically abusing you because you will be defenceless, as they are today.

Today they cannot express their feelings to you because they are doing it with violence, and you have no idea of the violence that goes on in the school and in the community at night, because you’re sitting at home or sleeping while they are in an abandoned building or breaking into public and private buildings. They are breaking windows of the vehicles. You see that and can’t imagine how much that child is hurting to be doing that. It’s as if they want you to see something that is as damaged as they are.

It is not too late for you to have a better future and for your child to have a better future. Do it before your child is behind bars and says:

“I watched you beat mom. I didn’t know how else to shut my wife up.”

If you feel that you learned violence from your parents, sit with your father and mother to get closure, because you never had the chance to do it. Tell them you want to be a better parent. I am sure that today they will support you, because they brought you up in that environment.

I am only saying this because I care for you and for your wife and especially for your children. I have grown to feel responsible for your child’s actions, because for so long, you depended on the police to take care of them when they committed a crime.

I will support you if you want help and not judge you, because I am not there for that. I am there to help you as a friend, as a police officer, and as a member of the community.

Let’s hear the children who crying out for help together and give them hope for a better future.

March 3, 2006

Was the Kelowna deal a dud?

What a difference three months makes.

This past November, aboriginal leaders engaged in an orgy of self-congratulation over the so-called “agreement” they extracted from ex-Prime Minister Paul Martin and Canada’s 13 provincial and territorial premiers at the first ministers conference in Kelowna, British Columbia.

In a press release excreted Nov. 25 by ITK’s communications department, the appointed president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, Jose Kusugak, called it “three touchdowns and a field goal,” referring to the Martin government’s commitments on housing, education and something called “relationships,” whatever that is. The field goal, apparently, is for the federal government’s supposed commitments on health care.

Three months later, however, it looks as if the ITK Roughriders are mired in a third-and-long situation after fumbling the ball in their own end zone.

Here, for example, is what they bragged about last November: “Inuit are thankful for the 1,200 housing units promised over the next five years. Funding will flow in time for the 2006 sealift and construction season.”

Here’s another nose-stretcher, taken from an ITK press release dated Jan. 24: “The Kelowna Accord included an agreement to build 1,200 new housing units in the four Arctic regions, with materials on the ships in the summer of 2006.”

Really?

The Government of Nunavut’s 2006-07 budget, unveiled last week, makes no mention of any new federal money for social housing. The GN did manage to scrape up $5 million for new social housing out of its own coffers, enough to build 10 measly duplexes containing 20 new units.

That’s a long way from the lavish promises that are alleged to have been made at Kelowna. It’s obvious that this summer’s Arctic cargo vessels will not be laden with construction materials for Inuit housing.

Indeed, GN officials say that they’re not even close to knowing when, or if, any social housing money will flow from the Kelowna arrangements. They say that, first of all, the new Conservative government must finish reviewing the Kelowna documents. After that, officials must hold more meetings to work out detailed plans for spending the money “committed” at Kelowna, including a meeting of the country’s finance ministers.

Last November, it was obvious that the Kelowna “agreement” was not an “agreement” in any sense in which that word is understood by ordinary people. At best, it was a well-intentioned if somewhat vague statement of principles, a political guidebook to help bureaucrats plan better programs for aboriginal people.

But there’s no detailed plan for the spending of new money on anything. Given that ITK and the other aboriginal organizations claim to have spent 18 months working on the process, this is shocking. What were they doing with their time?

This absence of serious thought is revealed even in the few scraps of real information that the public is allowed to see.

The numbers announced for Inuit housing, for example, don’t make sense. In 2004, Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. and the GN estimated that Nunavut now needs 3,000 new social housing units to meet the current backlog, and that in five years, Nunavut will need 4,000 new social housing units. That’s based on a level of need that grows at a rate of 200 units a year.

But the Kelowna documents state that Ottawa will reduce the backlog by 35 per cent within five years, by building 1,200 new units. These numbers just don’t add up, and you can do the arithmetic yourself. You’ll find that 35 per cent of 4,000 equals 1,400, not 1,200.

And if ITK is to be believed, these 1,200 units will be built in the “four Arctic regions,” not just Nunavut. That means the 1,200 units would be divided up between Nunavut, the Northwest Territories, Nunavik, and Labrador. If the distribution is done by population, Nunavut, with about 50 per cent of Canada’s Inuit population, would get about 50 per cent of the units. That’s roughly 600 units, enough to meet a measly 15 per cent of the need.

If this is true, it sounds like a betrayal. What do you think? At any rate, it’s no wonder that Monte Solberg, then the Conservative finance critic, said this past January that the Kelowna arrangements were worked out “on the back of a napkin.”

Meanwhile, Jim Prentice, the Conservative government’s new DIAND minister, said this week in an interview with Canadian Press that an “overwhelming amount of work” must be done before the Kelowna arrangements can be carried out, including the creation of a “rational, sustainable financial plan.”

It’s predictable that Prentice will be excoriated for saying this, but he’s telling the truth. The Treasury Board does not release money without some kind of plan showing where’s it’s going and what it’s for. That’s how the federal government works. It’s astounding that ITK, and other aboriginal organizations never grasped that.

To their credit, GN officials aren’t making any promises based on the Kelowna arrangements. This is a wise course, because for all we know now, the entire deal looks like a dud. JB

TOP

Advertising
Specs, rates,
& maps
Multi-paper
buying services
About the market
E-mail ad dept

More Information