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June 30, 2006

When they’re mad at the premier

You can always tell when people in the northern territories are mad at their government — because that’s when they start demanding the direct election of a premier.

Such was the case when the three Nunavut regions sat within a united Northwest Territories, and such is the case in Nunavut today, where some municipal leaders and MLAs are exhuming the decayed corpse of a notion that expired years ago: the idea of a directly-elected territorial premier.

Iqaluit City Council passed a resolution not long ago in support of direct election for a premier, and it’s likely that Elisapee Sheutiapik, the mayor, will urge the Nunavut Association of Municipalities to follow suit.

At the legislative assembly’s recent leadership review, some MLAs woke up long enough to raise the same idea. One of those was Tagak Curley, a failed candidate for the premiership, who asked why the people of Nunavut can’t elect their premier, instead of MLAs.

That is not an unfair question. But it was asked, and answered, more than 10 years ago.

The Nunavut Implementation Commission — remember them? — discussed this in their 1995 blueprint for Nunavut’s government, Footprints in New Snow. They also studied the issue in detail, and published their findings in a widely-circulated supplementary report.

The NIC concluded that a system of direct election for the premier raised more questions than they were capable of answering.

For example: Would a directly-elected premier sit as an MLA in the assembly? If so, what constituency would he or she represent? Could a directly-elected premier, or his or her cabinet, be removed by a vote of confidence?

The last question is important — because if we were to get a premier who is directly elected by a majority of all voters, not MLAs, there would be little reason to let MLAs retain their power to remove that premier. Our current group of MLAs are an uninspired bunch, mostly. But in the future that won’t always be the case. In the future, we could actually end up with MLAs who take their jobs seriously. Do we really want to remove their power to make the premier accountable to the assembly?

The NIC concluded that a system of direct election for a premier would be extremely difficult to fit into the Westminster system of Parliamentary government that supplies the Nunavut legislature with most of its rules.

But for most ordinary people, this isn’t an abstract constitutional issue. When it arises, it’s because people aren’t happy with the sitting premier and his government. It’s an easy way to vent their frustration.

So it’s not hard to figure out why Iqaluit City Council now backs the idea of a directly elected premier. It’s because they’re furious with Premier Paul Okalik and his government for a variety of reasons, the biggest of which right now is the question of where to build a sea port in the South Baffin.

The City of Iqaluit put a lot of work last year into a proposal to build a small port at the end of the causeway.They’re not happy that the premier, who is also an Iqaluit MLA, does not back that lobbying work and seems content to let his government promote a dubious scheme for a port at Kimmirut connected to Iqaluit by road.

And as with most other Nunavut municipalities, there are numerous smaller irritants complicating the city’s relationship with the Government of Nunavut: infrastructure, funding, waste disposal — you name it.

Being a premier or cabinet minister can be a fun job when you’re popular. When you’re unpopular, your constituents will tear you apart like a pack of wolves feasting on a wounded caribou. Just ask any ex-premier or cabinet minister from the old days.

Of Iqaluit’s three MLAs, Okalik is already perceived as being less involved with Iqaluit constituents than the other two. This is not entirely fair. His job, for example, often takes him out of Iqaluit. And the premier must deal with all Nunavut communities in an even-handed manner.

But when the premier or cabinet minister is unpopular with the consituents in his own seat, he becomes especially vulnerable. Okalik would be well advised to heed the signs around him — especially if he plans to seek re-election as an MLA. JB

June 16, 2006

A road to ruin?

Nunavut’s long-suffering residents got a chance last week to learn a useful but alarming lesson about their bumbling territorial government.

And that lesson is this: Government of Nunavut officials are not only incapable of deciding what they want and stating why they want it — they’re incapable of telling the difference between a legitimate need and a psychedelic fantasy.

This lesson is contained, of course, in last week’s embarrassing leak of a report to cabinet that describes a lobbying junket in Ottawa last month, attended by most cabinet members and their hired help.

The incident shows that GN officials still think a road between Iqaluit and Kimmirut is a good idea. What’s worse, it shows that they’re actually saying that to federal government officials.

An Iqaluit-Kimmirut road is, of course, an idea that no thoughtful person could take seriously. Well, that’s unless you’re the kind of person who reads comic books with pictures of Martians on the front and you think the Martians are real. Then you might qualify for a job with the GN’s transportation department.

Any economist, or for that matter, any person with basic knowledge of how the world works, will tell you that the cheapest way to transport stuff from one place to another is by water, on boats. It’s been that way ever since human beings started buying and selling things. Overland transportation, especially over long distances, is and always has been more expensive.

So in the unlikely event that the Iqaluit-Kimmirut road-port scheme is ever built, it’s reasonable to assume that Iqaluit’s goods could actually cost even more than they do now. That’s because those goods would have to be offloaded in Kimmirut, transferred onto trucks, then hauled at least 160 kilometres to Iqaluit along a hideously expensive road — assuming, of course, that the GN keeps such a road in useable condition. In turn, private sealift customers would likely shun the Kimmirut port and stick to landing their goods in Iqaluit.

In any event, there’s no evidence that the GN has ever bothered to get the kind of credible, independent advice that would address such obvious questions. In September of 2002, the GN did hire SNC-Lavalin, one of the 10 largest engineering and construction firms in the world, to do what’s called a “scoping” study on the idea.

But that only creates even more problems, because SNC-Lavalin has a direct financial interest in the outcome of any such study. SNC-Lavalin specializes in the construction of big projects: dams, highways, bridges. For example, it’s the firm that built the multi-billion-dollar James Bay project.

We don’t doubt that SNC-Lavalin is a competent, professional and reasonably honest firm. But any south Baffin port-road study they have done, and are likely to do in the future, would be tainted by a perception of conflict of interest, because SNC-Lavalin is also a leading contender to construct the project, a contract that would likely be worth hundreds of millions.

This week, the City of Iqaluit called on the GN to do an assessment that would, in their words, “determine the most suitable location in south Baffin for a deep water port.” They say such an assessment should use the following criteria to compare the two schemes: total cost, social and economic impact and benefits, environmental impact, available infrastructure, and how much time it would take to develop each of the two projects.

This is a useful idea. If GN officials were to come to their senses and adopt the idea, it could give them a way out of the embarrassing position their stupidity has landed them in. Any competent study would surely show that an Iqaluit port is cheaper and provides more benefits for the money it would cost. But to do that work, the GN must hire an independent consultant who does not have a financial interest in the outcome of the study.

Some people think this issue is just a simple choice between two equally valid priorities. It’s not. It’s a choice between a reasonable, practical proposal, the Iqaluit port, and a wildly preposterous fantasy. But the GN seems addicted to expensive fantasies, as evidenced by their continued lobbying for a billion dollar Manitoba-Kivalliq road, an idea that may be even more fantastical than a mountain road between Iqaluit and Kimmirut.

Sadly, this promises to do immense harm to the GN’s credibility, especially in the eyes of the federal government. The eastern regions of Nunavut need better airports and docks, not highways. But by the time they get around to figuring that out, the GN may have degenerated into Canada’s saddest joke. JB

June 9, 2006

ICC responds to last week’s editorial

“It is difficult to envisage the survival of polar bears as a species given a zero summer sea-ice scenario”

Sheila Watt-Cloutier
Chair, Inuit Circumpolar Conference

Climate change poses huge challenges to the Arctic in coming decades (Nunatsiaq News, June 2, “Polar bears and global warming: who’s right?”).

Both the Government of Nunavut and the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, and hunters throughout the circumpolar Arctic, know that climate change will continue to damage the habitat of polar bears. This is why responding to climate change and managing animals and natural resources is one and the same issue.

Throughout my term as Chair of ICC, the premier and his key ministers have been tremendously supportive of the lead I have taken on climate change. Therefore, I would be surprised that the Government of Nunavut would consider the urgency any differently now.

The central issue is how and how best we can help hunters continue to take polar bears and other animals, even as we take action internationally to slow down and adapt to climate change.

We can’t let fear of making tough decisions get in the way of ensuring the long-term sustainability of natural things in the Arctic. This is why we need to continue to use global institutions to promote and amplify the Inuit voice on the sustainable use of natural resources, and to differentiate them from animal rights organizations.

More than 300 scientists from 15 countries and Arctic Indigenous Peoples took four years to prepare the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), endorsed by ministers of the eight Arctic countries in 2004. ICC helped to draft the terms of reference of the assessment so it would reflect Inuit concerns and would become “our” assessment as well as that of scientists.

We knew that history would be rewritten through this assessment, which is why it looks at culture and health, and why it has case-illustrations of hunting, fishing and trapping, something not done by any other international assessment of the impacts of climate change.

The ACIA projected massive melting of sea ice by the middle to end of the century creating a virtually ice-free Arctic Ocean every summer. What will be the impact of this on polar bears? On page 509, the assessment says:

“It is difficult to envisage the survival of polar bears as a species given a zero summer sea-ice scenario. Their only option would be a terrestrial lifestyle similar to that of the brown bears, from which they evolved. In such a case, competition, risk of hybridization with brown bears and grizzly bears, and increased interactions with people would then number among the threats to polar bears.”

Only a few weeks ago news outlets had stories of polar bears and grizzly bears mating — exactly what the assessment predicted! On the same page and still speaking about polar bears, the assessment says:

“The earliest impact of warming had been considered most likely to occur at the southern limits of their distribution such as James and Hudson Bays, and this has been documented.”

Sixty-one Inuit from Alaska and Canada have joined me in a climate change-based human rights petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. We want the United States to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases — 25 per cent of the world’s total — that contribute to climate change.

When we launched the petition I said it was a “gift,” an act of generosity, from hunters who were giving their age-old traditional knowledge and their scientific observations and wisdom to the world.

Our petition is the international “voice of the hunter.” The world would do well to listen to this voice.

June 2, 2006

Polar bears and global warming: who’s right?

Are you confused yet?

Two organizations, each of which, in its own way, purports to “represent” the Inuit of Nunavut, are taking diametrically opposed positions on whether global warming threatens to make polar bears extinct.

Talk about mixed messages.

One message, now so well-known it’s accepted as received truth in many quarters, comes from the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, which represents all the Inuit living on the planet. It’s expressed most famously within the human rights petition, signed by 63 Inuit from Alaska and Canada, that ICC submitted this past December to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

In it, ICC alleges that the United States violates the human rights of Inuit by refusing to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, and by refusing to co-operate with international efforts, such as the Kyoto Protocol, that aim to reduce such emissions.

This, the ICC says, violates seven sets of Inuit “rights,” including property rights, rights to a healthy life, and the “Inuit’s right to their own means of subsistence,” which they say is threatened, not only by the disappearance of ice for hunters to travel on, but by a predicted extinction of animals that use the ice, such as seals and polar bears.

The ICC sets out its fact-claims and arguments in exhaustive detail, with numerous citations from respectable scientific sources, such as the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment:

“Polar bears are unlikely to survive as a species.”

And:“Reductions in sea ice will drastically shrink marine habitat for polar bears, ice-inhabiting seals, and some seabirds, pushing some species toward extinction.”

This is important. To establish that global warming threatens the Inuit right to hunt, ICC must prove that global warming threatens the species that Inuit hunt.

But the other message, made by the Government of Nunavut recently, does much to weaken this case.

In a 12-page document sent this past March to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the GN’s director of wildlife research, Mitch Taylor, attacks the theory that forms a big part of the ICC’s case. He even mocks it:

“Polar bears have become the poster species for doomsday prophets of global catastrophe from anthropogenic climate change.”

Further along, after a thoughtful review of recent polar bear population studies in Nunavut that draws upon his vast knowledge of the species, Taylor says:

“Clearly polar bears can adapt to climate change. They have evolved and persisted for hundreds of thousands of years in a period characterized by fluctuating climate. No rational person could review this information and conclude that climate change predestined polar bears to extinction.”

Though he admits that global warming is real, and has even reduced the number of polar bears in Western Hudson Bay — the Kivalliq region, mostly — he asserts that everywhere else in Nunavut where conditions are different, polar bears thrive.

This too, is important. Because if you accept that ICC’s predictions are accurate, you must also accept that hunters ought to kill fewer bears. Conversely, if you want hunters to kill more bears, then, if you’re a responsible person it follows that you believe ICC’s predictions are wrong. If you want the species to survive, you can’t have it both ways. You have to choose which set of predictions to believe.

Taylor’s comments are offered in response to a group of U.S. environmental groups, who are asking that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Department re-classify polar bears as “endangered.” This would make it much easier for the same U.S. officials to ban the import of Nunavut polar bear skins, a decision that would erase at least $2 million a year worth of income that now goes to small Inuit outfitters and guides.

Those environmental groups, incidentally, describe the threat posed by global warming in a way that is virtually identical to how ICC describes it. But unlike the ICC, they remain true to their logic, and they allege that Nunavut made a big mistake when it raised its various regional polar bear quotas last year.

By the way, we should point out, for the record, that Taylor says his comments do not “necessarily represent the position or view of the Government of Nunavut,” and that they’re offered in his capacity as director of wildlife research for the GN.

Maybe so — but it’s a distinction without a difference. GN officials vetted Taylor’s comments. And in a passive-voice sentence that conceals who made the decision, he says “it was felt that the most appropriate submission from Nunavut on this proposal would come as a neutral and objective scientific review.”

For all intents and purposes, then, Taylor’s position is the GN’s position. And though it claims to be “neutral and objective,” it, like the ICC’s position, is biased by political ends. But to the extent that it is “scientific,” the GN’s position still does serious damage to the position taken by the ICC, an organization that represents about 82 per cent of Nunavut’s people.

Part of the problem, of course, is that this is all about probability, not certainty. Even rational predictions about what might happen in the future are impossible to prove. We never know what will happen until it does happen.

But it would still be helpful if the GN were to develop a coherent position on global warming, the Kyoto Accord, fossil fuel consumption, and even the human rights allegations contained in ICC’s petition. Given the GN’s torpid, aimless state right now, this is probably too much to hope for. It takes leadership and brains to stake out clear positions on important issues, and those qualities are hard to find within the Nunavut government and its laughably inept legislature.

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