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May 26, 2006

The Baffin fishery is controlled by foreign interests

A guest editorial by Nick Illauq

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The structure of the fishing companies created by the Baffin Fisheries Coalition and Qikiqtaaluk Corp. suggest that BFC and QC have handed over management responsibility for fishing operations to Nataaqnaq Fisheries Inc., a company owned and controlled by Icelanders and Greenlanders. Source: Documents filed with the federal government under the Corporations Act.

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This situation is especially revealed when one reads the comments made by BFC’s foreign partners to the media in their own countries.

The exploitation of Canada’s Baffin fishery by foreign interests was described this way in 2004, in an Icelandic newspaper published in July, 2004, on pages one and two.

“Shrimp trawler Salles that has been fishing shrimp on Flemish Cap using Estonian fishing days [and] has been registered into Canada and will in the future fish from the generous turbot and shrimp quota in Canada. Company Bjarnar owns 55 per cent of the trawler and Royal Greenland owns 45 per cent... Steingrimur and Finnur in co-operation with Royal Greenland have achieved what many have tried with different results. Few ships, some owned by Icelanders, have gotten short-term licences to fish turbot that the native inhabitants in North-East Canada control, but no one has before been able to get their ship registered in Canada and gotten control of quotas for long-term.”

Bjarnar is an Icelandic company owned by Steingrimur Erlingsson and Finnur Hardarsson. Royal Greenland is owned by the Danish government on behalf of Greenland. The trawler Salles had been owned by Royal Greenland, but is now Canadianized as the Inuksuk I and is owned and managed by Nataaqnaq Fisheries, which is owned jointly by Royal Greenland and Bjarnar.

“Royal Greenland acquired considerable part of the shares in Bjarnar. Finnur and I hold the majority of the company and handle completely its daily management,” Erlingsson said in a September, 2005 article in the Iceland trade magazine Fiskifrettir.

BFC’s Icelandic partners have begun to consider themselves “Canadian,” as they explain in the same article:

“...when Nataaqnaq Fisheries was established there arose some misunderstanding in the Canadian media that Canadian jurisdictional waters had been opened up to foreigners. It was not taken into consideration that these were foreigners who had established a Canadian company to cooperate with the locals as had been customary for many years. It took considerable energy in the beginning to correct that misunderstanding. The colleagues stated that this had come as a complete surprise to them as they were probably more ‘Canadian’ than most others in the same position.”

This situation works well for Royal Greenland, as their former trawlers continue to operate in Davis Strait, using their ports in Greenland as “home ports.”

A February 2006 article in the IntraFish newsletter reports that “Royal Greenland recently announced plans to add two vessels to its operations in Canada to target turbot and other species.”

Royal Greenland also formerly owned the trawler Saputi, recently acquired by Qikiqtaaluk Corp., which has a 51 per cent share in the vessel, with the remaining shares held by Nataaqnaq Fisheries Inc., who will manage vessel operations.

Nataaqnaq Fisheries is the same company that owns the factory freezer trawler the Inuksuk 1, which the BFC is currently leasing to own. Nataaqnaq Fisheries is owned by Royal Greenland and Bjarnar, and Royal Greenland holds a mortgage on Saputi.

The Intrafish article stated that “as its operations in eastern Canada are close to Greenland, the company can utilize processing facilities in Greenland without affecting the quality of the fish produced.”

Under the North Atlantic Fisheries Organization agreement, 50 per cent of the total turbot stock in northern Davis Strait is allocated to Greenland, a substantial portion of which is caught by Royal Greenland vessels.

It is ironic that Royal Greenland’s “partnership” with BFC enables ex-Royal Greenland vessels to now catch almost 100 per cent of all the turbot in northern Davis Strait.

In the Intrafish article, Royal Greenland stated that: “They are the world’s largest supplier of turbot and, with this latest program, they hope to further stabilize their position in the market.”

On its web site, Royal Greenland states that it is the world’s largest supplier of cold-water shrimp. In partnership with BFC, it is now the beneficiary of the BFC plan to swap some of its substantial northern turbot quotas for southern shrimp quotas to facilitate joint-ventures and thereby enable ex-Royal Greenland trawlers to operate year-round on both turbot and shrimp quota.

With its deep financial pockets (as a Danish government corporation) Royal Greenland should, in a few years, be the dominant player in the Canadian offshore shrimp fishery.

We should not stand by and allow our Canadian fishery to be taken over by foreigners masquerading as Canadians. Our Canadian government should be helping aboriginal people in coastal communities develop their own sustainable fisheries economy on their own terms, and deny assistance to the Danes and Icelanders in their effort to control Canada’s northern fishery.

Aboriginal people who live in the Baffin coastal communities are being denied direct access to turbot quota adjacent to their communities unless they participate in foreign-dominated deals through the BFC.

Certain communities are proposing that the quota be caught in an environmentally sustainable manner using Canadian owned fixed gear fishing vessels rather than the destructive bottom trawling of the re-flagged Danish owned trawlers, which will likely lead to the eventual destruction of the northern turbot fishery, as has already happened in the south.

It’s about time that our Canadian government supported a truly Canadian fishery — owned and operated 100 per cent by real Canadians.

Nick Illauq
Clyde River

May 12, 2006

Berger yes - but with conditions

Thomas Berger's report on Nunavut's school system is now widely discussed and widely praised in Nunavut. A few people have even read it.

For his part, Jim Prentice, the minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, says he wants to study it, study it, and then study it some more.

We hope he does just that. Although none of its findings and none of its prescriptions are new to most Nunavummiut, it could become a valuable tool for reforming education in Nunavut.

But if the federal government does decide to carry out Berger's advice, it must do so with all due care and diligence. Berger recommends spending large amounts of new money on a bilingual education system, on top of $20 million in new short-term spending within the land claim agreement's implementation contract.

So to ensure that Canada's money isn't poured into an unaccountable sink-hole, the federal government, before accepting Berger's advice, must insist on two things: the creation of evaluation systems for Nunavut schools, and the elimination of damaging hiring practices at the Government of Nunavut.

Evaluation

In Chapter 6 of their 2002 book, Language in Nunavut: Discourse and Identity in the Baffin Region, Louis-Jacques Dorais and Susan Sammons reveal the damage that is done to bilingual school programs when the territorial government does not evaluate them and does not set clear standards.

They found that the Government of Nunavut does little evaluation. They found that students are not evaluated to find out what they know. They found that Inuit teachers are not evaluated to find out if they have the academic proficiency to teach subjects other than language. And they found that curricula and programs aren't evaluated either.

"The fact that no systematic evaluation of language programs has ever been undertaken in Nunavut seems to suggest a widely shared willingness by the Department of Education and those controlling language policy to accept, at best, mediocre standards in Nunavut schools," they wrote.

We also know that the GN does not now participate in a national system of standardized tests developed by the Council of Education Ministers.

That decision followed the release of results from a test in 2001 that measured the achievements of all 13-year-olds and all 16-year-olds in mathematics. Nunavut's performance in that test, as expected, was the worst in the country, by an embarrassing margin.

But the purpose of such tests is not to help education officials, teachers, or pupils feel better about themselves. The purpose of such tests is to generate vital information.

That's why evaluation is essential - it generates essential information. Without this information, no one can possibly know whether standards are met. Standards are supposed to tell you what you are expected to achieve, but without evaluation, standards become meaningless. Without evaluation, you have no way of knowing if standards are met.

Evaluation is therefore an essential tool for accountability. Without the information that evaluation systems generate, parents cannot know whether their children are learning what they are supposed to learn, and neither can their children. School administrators cannot know which teachers are doing a good job and which teachers aren't, and therefore cannot identify those ineffective teachers who need to be either retrained or weeded out.

Administrators also cannot know if prescribed teaching methods and programs actually work. Neither can government officials, who cannot know if the money they spend is producing the government's stated goals.

If the federal government decides that it's in the public interest to give Nunavut large amounts of new money for a bilingual school program, it must do so only if the GN agrees to develop clear standards and systems for evaluation that show whether those standards are met.

The development of a federally-funded bilingual system will require lengthy negotiations between Nunavut and Ottawa. But Ottawa must make it clear, from the beginning, that the development of an evaluation system is a non-negotiable issue.

The GN's record

In his report, Berger finds, more or less accurately, that the GN has "strived mightily to provide opportunities for virtually all qualified Inuit." This is driven of course, by a numbers game: a game in which the GN is judged by the percentage of Inuit holding GN jobs.

Individual departments are judged the same way, producing intense competition among them for qualified Inuit employees.

But for those who play it, the game produces short-term achievements that lead to long-term damage. Berger points out that this game has become so intense, GN departments now do things that actually damage the quality of government services and undermine their own training efforts.

He says the most obvious example of this is the poaching of qualified Inuit by one department, at the expense of others. Though this may temporarily help the poaching department's image, it does long-term damage to the government, especially when the affected employees find that there's no support for them in their new jobs.

The greatest damage is done to the Department of Education, which has suffered the loss of numerous Inuit teachers, lured away into less stressful non-teaching jobs elsewhere in the government. The result? The Department of Education now loses more Inuit teachers every year than it is able to train. The resulting shortage of Inuit teachers is becoming a crisis.

So it would be foolish, obviously, for the federal government to put large amounts of new money into a bilingual education program if there is no one to teach it. Ottawa must insist that GN departments stop poaching teachers to fluff up their Inuit-hire numbers.

Another damaging GN practice is its habit of hiring promising young people before they get a chance to finish college or university. People with high school diplomas and perhaps a few college courses are recruited into highly-paid jobs without having to do much to show that they're qualified for them. They're given fancy job titles, such as "policy analyst," while no one knows what they really do.

This well-intentioned but damaging practice creates a serious disincentive that actually defeats the long-term goal of Article 23. Why should anyone bother to put themselves through the many years of lonely struggle that lead to a bachelors' or masters' degree if they can get a $75,000-a-year job with a high school diploma or less?

Such disincentives would also defeat the purpose of a new bilingual education program, as well as the immediate $20 million that Berger recommends spending.

If the federal government does agree to carry out Thomas Berger's advice, they must do so with all due care and diligence. And that includes ensuring that the GN will clean up its hiring practices. That too, ought to be a non-negotiable condition. JB

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